If you’re like me, I expect your work tends to follow you home at the end of the day. This is certainly the case if you’re a student. They call it homework for a reason. For me, it was often hard to leave behind the legal matters I had labored over at the office each day. I’d get home and worry over them. I’d ruminate about all the things that had gotten pushed to tomorrow and were right now just waiting for me to take up again.
Likewise, as a minister, as evening approaches, I can leave the church grounds, but inevitably new tasks and matters to address pop into my mind. And of course, new events occur all the time without regard to what the clock says. I expect your employment and circumstances of life are similar, but whether it’s related to the jobs we’re paid to do or all the other endeavors we take on, our conscientious minds, and of course our cell phones, have tethered us to our work so closely that it’s hard to feel we’re ever completely done for the day. There’s just not enough time to do everything. There’s always more coming along. Work is essentially endless in nature, and for this reason, it falls squarely upon each of us to know when we must, for our own good, just call it a day.
British writer Oliver Burkeman has written what looks like a terrific book—one unfortunately, I haven’t found time to read yet, called Time Management for Mortals. Fortunately though, Burkeman also sends out a short and insightful monthly email to his readers called The Imperfectionist. Just a few weeks ago in his helpful email, he took up this very question: “What does it mean to be done for the day?”
Experiencing the sense of being finished each day, Burkeman suggests, doesn’t only make for a more pleasant life, but actually in the end, makes us more productive. If we’re always feeling like there’s a great deal more we should have accomplished, and that things have been left undone, the message our nervous system receives is that it can never relax. It can never really downshift. Self-defeating, fear-engendering, worry-inducing—ironically this is what then leads to the habits of procrastination we sometimes beat ourselves up over. Burkeman suggests that we simply have to accept the idea that we can’t possibly do all the things that have to be done each day, and—instead of ruminating over it—develop an alternate “definition of ‘finished’ that doesn’t encompass all of them.”
What might such a definition look like for you? What can you do to signal to your nervous system that it can truly relax and take a break? What can you do to internalize a sense of done-ness at the end of each work day?
In a meeting I was a part of not long ago, I asked those present if this was a challenge for them and Kristie Walton, a wise counselor participating in the group, said she had a ritual at the end of her work day that helped her with this issue. She would put away all the things, all the files she was working with, close the cabinet where they were kept, and then lock it up. While in some sense, this might not seem like such an emphatic act, she had made it a meaningful one, symbolizing in her own mind that the work of the day was done and that what could be reasonably finished on this day was now, in fact, finished.
Is it possible for you to come up with such an end-of-the-day ritual that tells your nervous system to downshift into a different mode? Doesn’t this sound like a healthy and practical thing for all of us to do?
I’m not sure about the contours of Oliver Burkeman’s faith, or if he even holds one, but in his writing, he often invokes the concept of the Sabbath and clearly values the idea. He says the notion of Sabbath tells us there is a time to “set down your tools not because the work is finished, but just because…it’s time to stop anyway.” It’s clear he has read the account in Genesis where God did this very thing. God rested because the work was done and instructed us to do the same. If God can do this—who are we to somehow think our own work is never concluded? Who are we to refuse the incredible blessing God offers us and knows we need?
God—Help me, after accomplishing what might reasonably be accomplished each day, to fully embrace the feeling of done-ness, and rest. Amen.
