The only holiday named after work
Tomorrow is Labor Day, and somebody I work with is spending it in the hospital.
That is the part of a holiday also seem a little ironic. Most people get a Monday off. A hospital, and plenty of other service industries, get a coverage problem that was solved months ago in a spreadsheet by. The reason you have tomorrow off is that a colleague does not.
I have worked plenty of holiday. Working them is not the hard part. The building is quiet, the hallways are empty, and there is an odd collegiality to being one of the few people in it.
The hard part is the other version. The day I am off
I tell myself I will relax. Here is what I have historically done with a three-day weekend. I have filled it. Not with the garden, or a trip to the beach, though that is what I commonly tell people. I spend it with the pile. Dictations. The scut work that has piled up. A lecture I said yes to in the spring. Somewhere back in June I started saying a sentence I never examined: I will get to it over the long weekend.
The weekend was allocated before it arrived.
I am not describing laziness or its opposite. I am describing a habit of treating unclaimed time as a safety net. Any unscheduled hours gets swallowed before I realize what happened. That is not a scheduling problem. It is a reflex, and I have had it for twenty years.
What gets me about Labor Day is what it was for. Labor Day arose from a labor movement whose argument was that the amount of work a person does should have an end, and that the end should be written down where someone else could see it. It is a bargaining holiday, not a self-care holiday. The people who won it were not asking permission to rest. They were asserting a limit.
We are not good at limits. Everything in our training rewarded the opposite. But the distinction is worth holding onto.
A day off you spend catching up is not a day off. It is a shift nobody paid you for.
So here is the move, and it takes ten seconds. Before you open anything tomorrow, write down one sentence: what is this day for? Name it before it names itself. An hour with a name on it is much harder to spend by accident.
I wrote about the mechanics of this on the blog last week. Rest is not one thing. It is four separate skills, and they fail independently, which is how you can sleep eight hours and still walk into Tuesday empty.
The pile will still be there Tuesday. It always is.
I'm here if you need me.
— Ben
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