I know, I know: I just said you wouldn’t be seeing many blog posts here. But I also said I wouldn’t be able to resist. And it’s Saturday! And I have thoughts. So.

As I noted last week, taking a vacation can provide helpful reminds to us. Not just, as I noted there, about our own role in our teams. Also about the importance and goodness of rest, and the way that we are better able to accomplish the good of work when we also rightly pursue the good of rest.

I took four half days. That was it. Not an extremely long or even a total vacation. But the difference it made… This week, I more than made up for those half days in productivity, both at work and in my side projects.¹

Rest is essential for us.

Now, what I’ve just written could be taken as a way of instrumentalizing rest: “Rest is good because it makes us better at working.” That’s not it. It’s rather that when we rest appropriately because rest is a good and necessary element of the design of human beings, we also find that we flourish in the other aspects of our lives. Most goods in our lives are simultaneously interrelated; and you cannot pursue one of those goods merely for the sake of another, failing to recognize it as a good in its own right, or usually you will end up getting neither.