The three kinds of rest every freelancer needs
As alluring as it sounds, bingeing Netflix all day can be harmful. It could actually make you feel more anxious, tired, or whatever emotion stopped you from getting your work done. Rest is about rejuvenation and recuperation so you can be more successful—not so you can do nothing and hope for the best.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes doing absolutely nothing is precisely what you need. It’s just not all that you need and doing too much of it will cause harm over good in the long run. I learned this lesson from my Olympian track and field coach while a varsity athlete at Yale. But it wasn’t until I founded my freelancing business did I see just how applicable the lessons were to entrepreneurship.
Rest 1: Active rest
The premise of active rest is simple: it’s the things that make the things you need to do easier.
Wordy, right? Let me explain.
Let’s say you have a huge project with a client but you are stuck on step three. So you got started, but then boom, nothing. Hello mental block. Whether you’re burnt out, scared, or something else, you find you just can’t figure out the solution. But you have to be productive.
This is where active rest comes in. Active rest is all about unblocking mental blockers and facilitating your work.
Ok, so you’re stuck on step three. We’ve all been there. Active rest is about doing things around that task that will make it easier. Like:
Conducting some research on the topic.
Getting some inspiration from other freelancers you admire.
Whether it’s increasing your education, your “infrastructure” or building a system so the main input of your task becomes automated, active rest is all about facilitating your work.
Active rest comes with the major downside that, at the end of the day, it’s fake productivity. Sure, you did some research, but you still didn’t get past step three in your checklist.
It’s easy to leverage these tasks as excuses for not doing what you really need to do, so it’s best to keep this to 10-15% of your working hours so you reap the benefits but don’t get sucked in.
Rest 2: Functional rest
Functional rest is about getting completely out of the headspace you’re in when you “do the thing” but not shutting off completely.
Putting it simply: do something else that gets your brain going that is unrelated to work. It’s the work equivalent of “I can’t talk about that right now”.
In particular, functional rest is great for idea generation. Your mind is working, but you aren’t so “close” to the problems you face.
So if you can’t quite get to that client task, think of other unrelated, yet stimulating things you can do.
Workout
Read a book
Have a conversation about anything other than work (politics usually works for the strong-willed)
Meditate (make no mistake, meditation is an active thing)
Functional rest is really helpful, but the downside is that it can throw you off course. You might really like chatting with your friend or reading that book, but suddenly you get sucked into that world and try to map lessons from it too closely to your business. Take ideas as inspiration, but always contextualize them to your business when you get back to work.
It’s best to keep this to around 10% of your working hours (so about 4-6 hours a week).
Rest 3: True rest
This is when you shut off, but only kinda. Like the other two types of rest, true rest is contextual. The focus is to shut off and restore any faculties you need in order to do the thing later on.
Depending on how intense the actions that you need to take, this can be all-consuming and it may render you watching Friends reruns for the fifth time. That’s ok. True rest is all about energy recuperation.
This could mean:
Mindfulness-focused meditations
Going out with friends
Watching a movie
Bingeing Netflix
Going for a leisurely walk
The only thing to be aware of is how seductive this type of rest seems. It’s so luxurious. You deserve this, right? Be careful. It is absolutely, 100% necessary, but too much of a good thing will damage you in the long run.
It’s best to limit this to about 5-10% of your total allotted time for working.
Rest properly so you can act energetically
Adding up the totals, you see that rest only takes up about 30% of your time. However, for some that’s revolutionary. We live in a society that doesn’t take enough rest or doesn’t take the right kind of rest. We often assume it’s a binary where you’re either doing (taking action) or resting (explicitly not taking any action), but the reality is much more of a spectrum.
When I was a varsity athlete, I spent the majority of my time doing my sport and perfecting my technique. As an entrepreneur, I spent most of my time on whatever critical thing the business needed at the time - most of the time it was getting new customers.
In both cases, by resting properly I got more out of my efforts when I acted; I’m sharing this framework with you in the hopes that you get the same benefit.
