Sunday…A Day Of Rest…What A Concept

If you were raised the North American, as I was, Sunday was always seen as a day of rest.
You’d go to church, say hello to the people you only saw once a week take the kids somewhere for brunch and then hunker down to watch whatever was going on sports wise, have a big dinner, which somebody actually had time to prepare, watch a movie or whatever and go to bed.
If you work for yourself, however, all of that is just something you used to do when you had a job. To quote Bob Dylan, which I often do, things have changed.
For a lot of us, especially those of us who have already raised their families, there is a marked tendency to forget about time in the normal sense altogether. At least it’s been that way for me for quite a while now.
Yes, I Was Once A Working Stiff
Even when I had a job in advertising and technically had the weekends off, I was always doing some sort of freelance work. For a while there I wrote a bunch of screenplays and I was always writing lyrics. But mostly I would do this stuff late at night, when my head was clear.
Of course back then I had tons of energy and frankly never found creating advertising all that difficult, as many people of my generation will tell you. It was fun, once you figured out that you were really putting together a marketing puzzle and not trying to re-invent the wheel every time out of the gate.
After I went on my own and started dealing with small business owners and managers, I found that the discipline that I had developed in the agency business was something they had never experienced before.
As a result they didn’t just become happy clients, but many of them became marketing students in an informal sort of way.
This, if course was very good for both of us. It helped in developing loyalty, and it helped in terms of making my clients smarter about their communication, which meant that they became, over time, more articulate in terms of telling me what they thought they needed to do.
They also became better organized and were able to take Sundays off themselves.

The Couch Potato Chronicles
With kids no longer around, and a wife with more hobbies than you can shake a stick at, my Sundays, for the better part of the first decade of this century, became the day when I would write a 3000-4000 word column called The Couch Potato Chronicles.
This column was, on the surface, a review of whatever I had seen that week that was worth talking about. Anything from a movie to a book to a TV series to a documentary to a news story.
But more than that, it was a journal, of that period in both my life and the life everything that rubbed up against my brain.
I stopped writing this column in about 2009, after having done about 450 articles totaling a couple million words. I then started doing it in smaller bits on Facebook, again mostly on Sundays. And still do to this day.
Things Have Changed And Not Necessarily For The Better
Over the past half dozen years or so, I have noticed an almost complete breakdown of the traditional middle class lifestyle that held Sundays under a sacrosanct light.
People go 24/7 now.
Most of the business emails I get arrive between 6 and 8 PM. Most of the conversations I have with my international clients happen on a Saturday, because they are too damn busy during the week.
The trouble with this is that it has happens so gradually that it’s hard to notice.
I once did a commercial for the Construction Safety Association about hearing loss in people who use jackhammers and are around loud equipment all day.
The gist of it was that this noise damages your hearing irreparably, but because it happens so gradually, many workers just don’t notice it until it’s too late.
That same sort of thing can happen to a lot of people who do not have the constitution or energy level to sustain the 24/7 roller coaster.
This is why you have so many people writing articles about the work/life balance.
And why you have so many going down with strokes, high blood pressure, heart attacks and other stress related conditions.
A lot of this is induced externally by fear. Fear of not earning enough income to sustain yourself. Fear of losing your job, because you don’t work hard enough. This is especially chronic in Pacific Rim countries. And fear of having set your personal goals too high for you to achieve, which leads to a lot of bad places.
My Advice.
Real simple. If you suspect that you working too hard, take a freakin' day off.
Organize your life and your work so that you can do that. You don’t have to do nothing, just something different. Something that’s play instead of work. Something that involves the people you love and not the people you work with. Something for yourself. Something gives you energy instead of taking energy from you.
I consider writing this over my Sunday brunch to be one of this things. Once I have posted this, I’m going to ignore my email. I’m going to put my computer to sleep. I’m going for a ride, because it’s a beautiful sunny Sunday. And then I’m gonna watch the baseball game.
But mostly it’s about what I’m not going to do, and that is work. Because it’s Sunday. And, believe it or not, some things in this life have to be reserved for you.

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