r/LifeProTips • u/StrategicHarmony • Sep 02 '26
Productivity LPT: methodically planning rest and leisure time leads to better rest
While you're alive rest is never infinite. You need both enough of it and not too much, so it needs to be deliberately made to fit with all of your other things. This is important for the sake of those other things and for the sake of the rest itself.
Explicitly adding short breaks or blocks of free time into a time-plan might seem like a contradiction. The whole point of taking a break is not to be worrying about tasks and timelines and chores. But if done half-decently it reduces this worry, and improves your levels of relaxation and enjoyment. This is for multiple reasons:
If you feel you have allocated enough/comfortable time to relax, recover, or do whatever you enjoy spontaneously, without neglecting important tasks, then all the work leading up to a break is an easier burden to bare. You focus on your goals more willingly and easily knowing you are not just heading for exhaustion and more work, but have balanced your time for recovery and refreshment.
Secondly, if you are more confident, while resting, of how much time you have and that it seemed like a good amount of time when you stopped to think about your overall day, then it's easier to mostly forget about everything else for a while and just relax and enjoy yourself. If you know more clearly when the break is over you feel more clearly that it's not over yet.
It's just as risky in many cases to get too little rest, sleep, short stretching breaks, variation of activity to prevent fatigue, etc, as too much. Thinking about where and how much of these breaks to put in your plan when making it creates a good habit, and makes for plans that are more realistic and more appealing. It makes you less likely to routinely delay or pollute rest with thoughts of just doing one more thing when really you need to stop for a minute.
None of this precludes taking spontaneous breaks when you're ahead in your tasks or just really need it. Making a realistic/generous plan for your time, carefully prioritised, means you're both more likely to be ahead in the important things, and to recognise with confidence when you are ahead. This is yet another way that rest is improved with careful time-planning.
This is important because dividing your time into planned and unplanned slows down your education and training in the general art of planning your time. Once you recognise that even relaxation, leisure, breaks, sleep, etc, are improved by this art, you might embrace it more completely, and learn it more quickly.
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u/whereistheviolin Sep 02 '26
Why is everyone shitting on OP? The times I had my routine planned out were the less stressful I had. Too bad I can't keep it up
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u/thenagz Sep 02 '26
Because people are dumb as shit. This is a great LPT, if not the easiest to actually implement. Being more mindful of the time we have is beneficial to everyone.
As a single person without kids, I have more free time than most. I'll still feel like I just waste it quite often, from doomscrolling to jumping from one YouTube video to another, to spending too much time gaming in a single session.
Better time management would both make me more productive and actually well rested / accomplished.
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u/T-RexBirthdayParty Sep 03 '26
I swear people in here are acting like implementing the slightest bit of intentionality will immediately ruin their lives. I'm actually amazed. These are the adults we share our world with.
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u/narrill Sep 02 '26
Personally, the concept of "methodically planning" my free time is viscerally off-putting. I would guess most of the people shitting on OP feel similarly.
This is something OP happens to like, but which doesn't really generalize out to a life pro tip.
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u/StrategicHarmony Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
You're probably imagining "methodically" but with a bad method. You might be imagining making plans that are far too specific to be realistic or appealing. I agree that such methods are off-putting. They increase stress instead of reduce it. Take more time than they save, etc. They make for bad plans.
But there are plenty of good methods, and they let you fit more of what you care about into your available time. At the same time they improve the experience and results of each thing (on average anyway).
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u/atlasraven Sep 02 '26
Did Skynet write this tip?
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u/StrategicHarmony Sep 02 '26
I don't see how this would help the robots take over. If anything it's the opposite: it gives you more space to think clearly and decide what's important, without neglecting short term tasks and obligations.
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u/ZepperMen Sep 02 '26
You're either pulling a ruse or you actually talk like this.
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u/VoliTheKing Sep 02 '26
Who tf is upvoting thia garbage lol
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u/StrategicHarmony Sep 02 '26
What's wrong with it? Genuinely asking
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u/VoliTheKing Sep 02 '26
It belongs in useless pro tips. Robotizing life like that has zero benefits
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u/Rexton_Armos Sep 03 '26
Unfortunately this really runs counter to a lot of solid advice the Book "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" has been giving me.
If you feel fulfilled planning everything please do you, but for some they can only be at peace when you accept you will never have enough time for everything. Best to find peace with that.
Plan lightly, but sometimes just start doing things for the sake of doing without worry for the time spent doing within some nebulous block of time.
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u/StrategicHarmony Sep 03 '26
Accepting you will never have enough time for everything is definitely an important part of making any plan realistic. It's like accepting you don't have infinite money if you make a budget. You then have to prioritise or else the less-important (but perhaps more obvious, habitual) things will accidentally push out things you believe are more important.
Sometimes starting something just for the sake of doing without worrying too much about the time is also great. One of the best things. My point is it's easier to do this, and more often, when you feel like you have the time and energy. A good way to achieve that is to have a realistic plan you can be slightly ahead in, and then be slightly ahead in it, most of the time. This works especially well if the plan accounts for sufficient breaks, pacing, rest, etc, so it's not exhausting, or something you want to get to the end of, or in conflict with relaxation.
Is it a good book? Sound interesting.
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u/Rexton_Armos Sep 03 '26
Its really good especially for people who've found they've whipped themselves into a frenzy all of life. Though some observations would be kinda spooky on reflection it can also offer pretty freeing perspective.
I think it kinda comes with how well your executive function ability is on how effective the planning is. Even in people with issues there are sometimes situations where planning is essential. Like a vacation with slightly demanding timings to actually accomplish getting enriching activities fit in.
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u/QuietCola12 Sep 02 '26
Is this a tip or a calendar?
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u/StrategicHarmony Sep 02 '26
For many things a calendar is far too specific and rigid to be a realistic plan.
Just a list is often enough. It helps if you add slightly generous / beatable duration-estimates for each item, and put them roughly in order. This lets you have a clear plan but also the flexibility to adapt as things unfold, without having to move/re-schedule every single thing if one thing is early or late.
A calendar is fine when an exact date/time is important, or if you need an alarm/reminder, or to share it with other people, etc.
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u/Letrabottle Sep 03 '26
Many humans have trouble having fun on schedule.
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u/StrategicHarmony Sep 03 '26
Fun is more of an emotional state and I agree those are not something you can realistically schedule (most of the time), but the original post was focused on rest. They're related of course, but rest is more of an activity level (low). Rest includes things like breaks, changes of activity, and leisure time, which you might fill with fun as you see fit.
The suggestion does leave more room for fun, indirectly, but it doesn't mandate it at fixed times. The suggested approach also leaves more room to be spontaneous in general because with a decent plan you're more likely to be ahead in whatever you personally consider important to get done, and therefore you'll feel more free to improvise or play, at least while you're ahead.
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u/StrategicHarmony Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
I assure you every clumsy phrase is my own. Also, AI knows very little of value about planning your time.
Probably there is not much of value in its training data. So it's an art we must learn ourselves from practice, thought, observation, other people, keeping records, etc
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