Rule of Life: How Ancient Practices Can Transform Your Productivity and Rest with John Drury

Sometimes the hardest part of focus work is not the work. It's getting your brain to agree that you're going to start working now. Brain FM is functional music designed to support focus sessions. It's not magic. It just lowers the friction to the on ramp of focus. And if you go to beyond the to do list dot com slash brain FM, you can get 20% off your gunna love it or go click the link in the show notes to get that 20% off. I've been using it for years. Trust me, this is a game changer again beyond the to do list dot com slash brain FM for 20% off. Hello, and welcome back to beyond the to do list a podcast about productivity. I'm your host Eric Fisher. In this episode, I am excited to revisit a two part conversation that I had with my long time friend of over 25 years. We met in college, Dr. John jury and John and I have a shared interest in productivity and the anyogram. We are both fives different versions of fives, but we're both fives and I had a great two part episode with him. So this is going to be part one revisiting the specifics of the concept of the rule of life. It's a way to anchor ourselves and orient around our values, our stabilizing practices. We all need those right now. And we're talking about the balance between over stimulation and under stimulation. And as we move into that, we talk about Sabbath practices, how a 24-hour period of rest from work can create increased productivity deeper connections with family. And also just a more holistic time management approach that works with you individually, but also you and your family or you and your friends. And then we'll go into part two, which I won't get into right now, but let's just say that one digs deeper into the realm of desert days and retreats and vacations and sabbaticals and how to fit that rest in in all different types of increments. So I love talking with John. I do it all the time, but you, I think, are going to really enjoy this part one of this conversation with John Dury. Well, this week I am welcoming a long time friend and a guest I've wanted to have on for a long time. It's John Dury. John you and I have known each other for gosh. What was that summer? 98? I think it was spring of 98 we met and then we worked together on maintenance crew that summer of 98. For 25 years? Yeah, so crazy. Mutual friend of ours, Todd Beshong, who's been on the show a number of times happened to say, Hey, you should have John on the show. And I said, you know what, I'm going to run with it this time because I've been meaning to for a long time. He pitched it a few years ago. Yeah, it's a bit more energy doing work for my show than that's true. I helped you launch your own show and all that. So I guess that is where that went. But we talked about productivity items and things before and there's a lot of mutual space there for us to have crossover in that we're both any a gram five, though not the exact same kind of any a gram five. So there's some similarity and yet, oh, well, I'm this way and I oh, well, I'm this way and it's really cool to have that kind of a difference when you're talking with somebody that's got some of those same similarities of how they approach life. So I knew we'd have some crossover there. But ultimately the biggest reason and the instigating reason Todd said John should be on the show was bringing spiritual practice and that word practice really qualified and added on to the word spiritual for me. We've had some kind of conversation on the show before when it comes to spiritual practices, but not I think in the way that we're talking about it or the way I want to talk about it with you today. And I think for me, one of the things that stuck with me we kind of had a conversation recently about this. One of the things that really stuck out to me was I personally have felt like we we meaning me and we meaning my personal friends and then we meaning society at large, I guess, have been in the different space or a more attuned space and more aware space when it's come to routines and rhythms and although those being completely broken for a while because of the pandemic and I think you felt this too. It was I mean you and I and two other friends we sat on and we created a fake podcast for community sake for a while there. I think a lot of remembered that. Yeah. It's like a lot of podcasts that never saw the light of day and some that are going strong now started during the pandemic. But in talking about that in talking about that self awareness or that that season that we all went through of over and both under stimulation and needing to get our bearings back and have some sort of a regularity when it came to let's just say it like our souls are humanists and that really rang true for me in terms of you know John's really somebody I can talk to about this. This would be a great conversation to have for the show and so you brought up this phrase and I hadn't really heard of it and I'm surprised that I hadn't because it really does apply to this show. Rule of life. Can you explain a little bit about that? You can throw that for people who have maybe never heard that term. Yeah. So I mean a rule of life I'll start here by just saying like every life is lived according to a rule. It may be an unjust rule. It may be imposed on you by others without your consent. It may be self-imposed but unconscious but all life has a shape or a pattern, a regularities. The word rule of life is in Latin. It's the phrase that it comes from is a regular Vite. That which regulates the life. You can kind of hear the word regular regular. That which is regular right? Orienting values, stabilizing practices, the shape of one's life right? In some ways it's very it's very objective. It's just like how would someone characterize your life if they just watched you? Which is kind of a disturbing but also exciting question to ask. Like what is the shape of my life? And I mean you mentioned the pandemic at the beginning. I remember so distinctly a few weeks in so many people saying they didn't know what day of the week it was. Which I took to mean they might not have had this explanation but it was manifesting to me that people needed work to tell them what day it was. Right? That's a risky way to live because that means you have a rule of life. It's imposed on you by the necessity of work to pay the bills and support your family and yourself and what not. The question isn't do you have a rule of life? The question is what rules your life? What are the regularities of your life? To adopt a rule of life is to say, okay, I'm actually going to start instituting maybe only gradually, maybe individually or with friends or with my family. Start instituting some patterns and rhythms that are going to start shaping my life. Perhaps at first merely as a kind of protest or minimal resistance to all the other things that are determining the shape of my life. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I really like and I love being a word nerd even when I don't know as many of the Latin versions of them and like you do and other friends do but I love that the word regulate or regulatory or regular that all those forms are in there and that also that the shape. Some people would say, well, what shape is it? What appearance does it have? Like forming something with your hands like clay but also what shape is it in? Like the wear and tear, the health of it. I'm thinking about all those different directions coming off of that. That's really good. Yeah. So one of the other things is just when I think of health, I think during that period, again, I said pandemic over stimulation and under stimulation at the same time due to depending on where you were and how you were and how long extended you were doing different precautions, etc, etc. I won't go into it but we were overstimulated through technology screens specifically and we use those screens to kind of quiet our minds in a way in a drinking saltwater kind of way. You're stranded on the ocean in your thirsty but you're drinking saltwater so it's not quenching anything kind of away but then also human contact and at the same time we were also depending upon who you were stuck with. If you were stuck with anybody, it was kind of a okay, I have my human contact but I have too much of it or the same people versus the difference and the getting out and the moving and the shaking and the the actual interaction, the other interactions I should say. Yeah, that stimulation question came up when we were talking about the early ancient development of some of this rule of life's business which comes out of the desert, desert monastics, desert monks, desert hermits in the Christian tradition and Egypt but also in other religious traditions that have roots in the Middle East, Sufism and indirectly Buddhism through the influence on the Silk Road so we don't have to do all the history there but I mean there are these cross-pollination that all takes place in the Middle Eastern desert as the kind of cradle of civilization as it used to be called. So there was a lot of experimentation early on with this movement into the desert away from the quote, "world." Not thinking that somehow God is out there or the real use out there as if the world is full of evil, but recognizing that there might be something confused or lost even in me, and I want to face that head on. And I can only face that head on if I don't have other things stimulating me to blame or direct my energy towards, right? So I heard someone define one time the desert as a place of radical under stimulation. Right? I mean, we talk about going out in nature. I'm not a big like naturalist type guy. People usually assume I am because I'm the way I am, but normally you go out in the woods or whatnot. It's actually very stimulating. There's lots to hear, lots to see. Especially if you haven't been out there. Yeah, it's like, wow, it's really loud out here. You think it's going to be quiet, but it's actually not. It's really loud, but the desert's really, really silent. It's disturbingly silent. The wind blows and you don't hear anything because there's no trees. And the animals don't make noises. They walk silently. They're not the kinds of animals that make noises. So it can be very just disturbingly silent and austere. And some people might be listening and saying, wow, I really could use that. And others might be like, that sounds terrifying. And you're probably both right and both wrong. You know, it's kind of, it is what it is, but something about that opportunity for radical under stimulation that took place during the shutdown that few of us took that opportunity. But it was an opportunity for radical under stimulation. And a few people took the opportunity and noticed, wow, I like this way more. Like I love that I can connect with my colleagues in a regulated way. Not whenever they feel bored with their work and come interrupt me. But because we have a time when we connect, we have a maybe a zoom meeting we get on or what not at 10. But I can just focus on my work from 8 to 10 and not wonder who needs to talk to me in order to get their day started. Right? Now that we're talking as fives and introverts here. You know what I mean? Yes. Now I'm not as introverted as you, but we are both fives. And so we were a little touchy on that. But the fact is a lot of people were kind of like surprised. And the under stimulation is not, I mean, few are called into the desert. But I think all of us need to recognize the desert that's hiding within that we can tap into for a little while. If only just so that we can reengage our regular life in the world with family, with friends, in the workplace, on purpose. Because you will have a regulated life. You will have a shaped life. And it's everyone else is just going to shape you into their mold. Your society, your bosses, your spouse, your children, your communities of various kinds are just going to kind of, they're going to put you into molds and it's going to drive you nutsy. And there's something about even brief seasons of under stimulation in which we begin in and then out of which we're able to start saying, well, how do I want to actually direct my energies so that I'm not just simply responding to stimuli all the time? Yeah. I want to actually, how do I want to direct my time and energy and resources? It's a cyclical thing and whatever amount of the, you know, we have a saying, we have more agency, I like to say that we have more agency than we think we do. And once we claim some of that back, and I think you even said it to me once where you said, you know, people talk about work life balance, but that's not for your employer to decide for you. That's for you to decide and then agree with or come to a compromise with your employer. Yeah, yeah. When employers talk about work life balance, I mean, it's always kind of a mixed bag to me. It's at best they're signaling that they care about you as a person. So that's nice. And so you take that and be grateful for that. It's like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not for them to manage. It's not for them to manage because at the end of the day, that means that it's work life balance on the terms set for the work life balance is the work, right? And it's like there isn't a thing called work and this other thing called life. You have a life and in your life, there's work. So life has to set the terms for the work, never the other way around because what are you dead when you're at work? Are you not alive? You're not living your life. I know I'm being, you know, picky on the language, but it matters. Work life balance is already the language is already a little bit. The language, yeah, the language matters. Yes. I mean, the category error because these aren't two equal competitors for your tension. Life is your life period, right? Yeah. And a life consists significantly of work. Work is a big part of life. Work is a beautiful part of life. Like in many ways, the kinds of balance that people talk about, the kinds of healthy boundaries and stuff that people talk about, to me, are not just about protecting yourself from it because part of what bothers me about is how beautiful work is and how much we insult it by thinking it needs to be this thing that needs to be controlled and balanced with. It's like, no, it's part of my life. I want my work to be beautiful and my work will not be beautiful if it's all the time. It's going to get thinned out and ugly, right? You have to stop the brush and put it down and pick up a different brush occasionally or it's going to be ugly. The work is going to be ugly, not just my life, you know? So having some sense of the limits of things is good for the work. It makes the work better too. Yeah. If there was one thing that I can think of that would be, you know, maybe this is my life's work, is to come up with some better term for this work life balance. Some people have said work life balance. Other people have said work life blending. And I'm like, yeah, but that's still a little, it's still, it doesn't get quite to the point. But anyways, life, yeah. And it's not some, you know, we're trying to say it's there's some holistic thing that needs to happen or something. I don't know. What we're getting at here though is there is no every single day the same forever and ever being an optimal solution or way of being. That's not a rule of life that I think anyone wants to have. But often that's what we find ourselves in and leads to burnout. Yeah. Workplace chaos is real. Deadline slip. In boxes multiply. Somehow the one person who can fix it is also the one who just gave notice when you need the right hire. This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs via to hire a new editor for this podcast. I wouldn't just say must edit audio. 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There are different ways just like there are different ways to pass the time or different markers of time on a timeline like daily, weekly, monthly, et cetera. When it comes to increments or cycles or moments we should be taking observing for regulating for ruling. Yeah. Intentionally. Yeah, I guess what I'd say that I've been I mean starting to articulate this through just of an image, hopefully it'll be a nice word picture so that it works in the auditory medium of a podcast. But most people have hands and most people have five fingers on each hand. So everyone who's listening, you can you can feel or picture your own hand or look at your own hands. And this is to keep it simple because if you do something too complex, this just becomes one more document of despair. You like right? I've seen people go off on like a retreat and come up with this elaborate new rule of life. And then it's you know, last three days and then it fizzles right because it's not actually realistic. I actually even say to people if you're going to actually write, not everyone writes something down again, you don't need to my rule of life is on my hands. I'm going to walk you through it in a second, but it's just 10 things right and I'm still working out. It's always in flux. But I usually say if you're going to write it down, it should be 80% what you're already doing. And only 20% aspirational. So if it's not 80% descriptive, it will be a documented despair. It will just judge you and condemn you and frustrate you. So you always want to start with like what are the things that already regulate my life that I want to keep and then maybe add one right? It's that simple. It's not easy, but it's simple right? It's actually a simplifying strategy, hard, but simple. And so I take the hands and I do that on purpose because on one hand, you want to start to articulate five orienting values, right? Five orienting values. And I'm actually not going to talk about those because I don't want that to overdetermine the conversations. I'm just going to kind of set that aside. And those are personal for you. Exactly. You don't want to prescribe something to somebody. here, that's for them. Yes, exactly. So I'm going to set that there, but that is where you need to kind of start. Well, you kind of do this. You do both hands at once. They go back and forth because often certain practices reveal to you what your values really are. So you kind of go back and forth. It's not a lock step, regimented process. Correct. Correct. And it's not linear. It's back and forth. So some orienting values. So I mean, I'll give an example of ones I've heard other people use so that it's not about me, but I will be specific about mine on my other hand when I get to those. But I'll give some mentions. So some orienting values would be literally, I mean, it can be, this can sound cheesy and silly, but these tend to be a little more abstract because these are the more aspirational. You know, when people say like family, family is important, you know what I mean? Like that's okay to say that, right? You may want to be more specific, like quantity time. We're not going to just try to have quality time. We're going to actually have quantity time. We're going to block time together. I heard someone use that term one time. That is someone say quality times the thing we made up for to feel less guilty about how little we are around, right? How about quantity times the thing that happens on accident while we're spending large quantities of time with our family, right? So quantity time with family, again, that's not actually one of my five. I mean, I do value that, but that's not how I would put it. That would be an example of an orienting value, right? And again, you want to try to be objective. Like if someone followed you around for a week, what four orienting values would they say kind of sum up how you make decisions and spend your energy? And I say four because yeah, okay, maybe there's one that is a value that is not being expressed yet. That's the aspirational one that might add, right? That's where the 80% one comes in, right? 80, 25 means four out of five, right? So does that make sense? Yeah. And that's kind of new. I used to not have that part in my rule of life. My wife was really pushing that, of course, because that's how she would think she's an entrepreneur and she's much more directed towards aspirational and towards the future and towards the new. So she's like, what are our values as a family that orient us, right? She's the one who pushed me on that. So that's the other reason I can't list my fives. I actually don't have them all set. I have like three maybe. And we're actually working on that this July, Mandy and I are going to spend some time on that in terms of our family rule of life using this same structure because I'm a lot more oriented towards like the past and the rhythms of life, which is the other hand. But is there anything you wanted to say about the values thing before I move to the practices? Because the other thing is five stabilizing practices. So it's orienting values and stabilizing practices. I like how I was going to use the word fluid, but I don't think that that's necessarily the right descriptor. I think it's something more along the lines of again, it's not boxed in. It's not set in stone. It's not you went away and which we will talk about going away at some point here. But I think you even said it. It's not that you went and you came back and you had here's my life's manifesto and now it's this is my five year plan. It's more adaptable. It's more it's not oriented towards goals. It's not trying to accomplish anything. Yeah. It's been lived. Yeah. So goals is how you accomplish things. Goals and then you break up goals into steps. Right. That's a great way to accomplish something. Well, you know what the final accomplishment of life is? It's called death. Right? So that's the goal of life is death, which sounds ridiculous. Of course, that's not what it is. Although it's kind of true, but I am into desert spiritual. We can get into that baby next episode or whatever, but it really is. It's asking, no, I actually want to live and die well. A life well lived. That means the whole thing is the goal, the whole thing, not the end game, the whole thing. Just the way I live it now and tomorrow and the next until the end. It's the way I'm going to live my life, not what I'm going to accomplish at the end of a series of steps, but what's being wrought in me as I live it. Right? So it has to be thought of more in terms of a way of being, a form of life, more so than a goal that I'm moving toward. Although that language is fine, but like, you know, it's about what the life is you're living now and the fruit you're bearing now, not just someday down the road. And that's what a lot of goal oriented talk and productivity talk is really geared towards is. That's good. It's good for work. It's works only one part of life. Yeah. And goal oriented, I mean, again, a lot of people talk about goals and one of the ones that comes up all the time as well. I want to lose this amount of weight or something. I want to be healthy and that's fine. But at the same time, it's not in the hearing now. Anyway, I digress. That's a tangent we could go down and we don't need to. So, but yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah, but it is connected because it's like, what's the kind of life I want to live versus like what's the kind of body I want to have? Like when people talk about I want to get that summer bot. Okay, that's a goal. I want to look a certain way in four months. Okay, what's the step so I need to take to get there? That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But that has a certain framework that does shape your soul towards treating even my own body as a project. The same way I might approach a spreadsheet that I need to develop or whatnot, right? Or a new course I need to write or a new system that I need to set up at work, right? And yeah, I can treat my body that way, but there are other ways to treat my body, right? And maybe I should occasionally try those out. I think something connected in my brain just now when you said work on yourself or something along those lines. It's like, yes, when we think about it as work on ourselves instead of who do we want to be? Like, who are we and who do we want to be? Is a way different question than what type of body do I want to have? What type of parent do I want to be? Like, that's a job in some sense. It's not a relationship. That's actually a perfect example. It's like if we're saying, you know, oh, I want to be a person of character. I want to be a good father or a good parent. But we look at it as the title of parent versus the relationship of father or mother or whatever. It's a very different approach. Yes. Yeah. And that's I think the distinction we're making here. No, that's just across life as itself. And that's why I'm saying that work-life balance phrase drives me nuts. But anyway. And so five stabling practices. And again, you kind of pick up how's this? Some people are left handed and some people are right handed. Some people kind of have to get the practices up and running before they could even articulate their values. That's me. Right? I need the system in place to even start having the space in my brain. I'm so 8 and E that if I don't have some structure, I'm not going to actually be able to be creative. Right? Others like, again, like my wife are much more like, if I don't know why I'm doing something, I'm going to hate it. I need to know why I'm doing it. So tell me the values, then I'll submit to these practices that feel like they're constraining my freedom. Whereas I'm like, please, constrain my freedom so I can have some freedom. So everyone's different. So you might be more left handed, you might be more right handed. And again, it's back and forth, back and forth. The orienting values and the stabilizing practices. But for me, the way I do it on my hand, and I actually recommend this structure, it's not the only way to do it, but it's so simple and clear, is I think of five stabilizing practices, something I do daily, something I do weekly, right? Something I do monthly, something I do quarterly, and something I do annually. And I know I just said do, but that's the point is, again, this is also a kind of work. It's going to feel like a little bit of work. It's going to feel like it's competing sometimes with the energy of other things. That's on purpose because you can only compete with work with other work, right? Right, like it's not going to, well, we actually don't know how to rest and just exist. You can learn to, but it takes time. So often the best way to work against the dominance of work in our life is to introduce other kinds of work that push against it, right, that are kind of modes of resistance. And so it can feel restrictive at first, but it always becomes a more liberating thing. Well, and we're talking about time. And so any amount of time gets filled regardless of if we fill it or someone else fills it, like we're talking about earlier with somebody else's either there is a rule. You're being ruled. Something's ruling it. So many hours a day at work. So many hours expected with the children. So many hours spent sleeping. So many hours at the gym. So many hours of the, I mean, it's just the way your life. Life and time are roughly synonymous. That's again why there is no such thing as work life balance because life is your time. Life is the span of time you have on the surf. That is life. You live 24 hours a day. So you don't work eight hours a day and live the other 16. You live 24. Work is among the things you do as you live. So you have to introduce other doings to create the balance of a life, right? And so that's that little pattern is nice. It's not the only way to do it, but I learned that a long time ago and I find it so simple. And those things are going to look different for everyone and not everyone will like that structure. But I feel like, and again, you want to ask again, descriptively, like for me, I'll just tell you which one of these is the kind of the least developed is quarterly. I don't have like a strong quarterly rhythm. Now some of that is, "Ha ha, watch out." Because of the way my work, my job, she job is even more narrowly conceived. There's certain ways my job is I'm a professor. So I have the fall, spring, semester, plus summer kind of structure. It's not built around the quarter of the way that business life is a little more quarterly - Yes. - So that might be a great starting point for some people who are in the business world where the quarter is kind of like a determining structure already. That's okay to just know that your job because it's probably is the thing ruling your life the most. It's okay to know that and be okay with that and start with what works. So for me, like, you know, so I have a daily practice. For me, I mean, there are lots of things I do daily, but I really kind of identify in terms of my own, what are the things that are keeping me a being and not just a worker, just a parent, just all these hats that I wear. Where's my hatless existence? That's good. I just had that thought. - I like that phrase. - Hatless existence, right? So my key hatless existence is I have a daily early morning practice where I have a kind of prayer practice that I go through in the morning and I have another one in the evening kind of right at the end of the work day before I go home. So it's ancient practice called daily office, morning prayer, evening prayer. That's what I do. Not everyone would have to do that, but you want to ask what are those daily things. And for you, like, if you're someone who works out every day, that's already what you do, then you can just say that's the thing because you probably are more, you're probably pretty hatless at the gym. That's okay. Like, this doesn't have to be religious. It doesn't even have to be quote spiritual. Maybe the broad sense of spiritual, but it's just those faces where you're hatless, right? If you have a kind of daily routine, and by the way, when I say daily, I mean, for at least four days a week. (laughing) So you round up to the nearest seven, or you round to the nearest seven. So if it's happening three out of seven days a week, that's not daily. Four, that's daily, right? I mean, you aim for six, you aim for seven, right? But you, you know, you don't beat yourself up. You just pick up where you left off. You don't kind of try to keep score 'cause you're trying to live, not trying to accomplish something, trying to exist. Yeah. So there's that daily thing. For me, the weekly thing is a weekly Sabbath practice. So every Friday evening at five, I already mentioned I have an evening prayer. So they start to interlock when you take this more seriously, right? So I have an evening prayer Friday. It's called Vespers, just a, Lingos fund, right? Yeah. So Vespers is a Friday evening prayer for 45. And I mean, the summer it's a little looser. During the school year, it's really tight, the time start. But I do it a little different on Friday. I kind of try to include some gratitude practices for the week, kind of to close the week as a ritual to close the week. And man, when I started keeping this Sabbath, Sabbath thing isn't a real verb. I don't like it when people say, when I started keeping this Sabbath, 'cause the Sabbath exists whether you keep it or not. Right. So when I started keeping this Sabbath, like I went from Friday being like the Piddle Day, where like you don't really do much to like my most productive day. This is rooted in the ancient Jewish stories about Moses and the people in the desert who would collect up the mana every day. They would be this bread. And if they collected up more than they needed for the next day, it would just turn MaggiD. It was just enough for each day, except on Friday, on the sixth day of the week, they would all collect a double portion. And it would keep an extra day. And this, by the way, this is before the commandment to keep the Sabbath. So God already kind of provided that pattern, that rhythm, that shape of life was already existing before it was instituted. She tells you something, right? What's already in your life that's already been given to you as a gift by maybe the way you were raised, or some patterns that your spouse has kind of drawn you into just to get on the same page, right? Or your work. Again, your job, your job may have given you some rhythm. That's a gift. - Yeah. - Take that, that's okay. Like, I don't know, we call it the weekend, right? I don't call it the weekend. I call it the Sabbath, and I call it the Lord's Day. The last day of the week and the first day of the week. I don't use language of weekend, but that's just me being a funny, dirty religious person. Yes, so that's Sabbath practice. And it's just, I don't read or respond to emails for 24 hours, five o'clock Friday through five o'clock Saturday. And I communicate that clearly. People know that. Most people can respect that. It starts in the evening, 'cause I'm not gonna work on Friday evening. That's not that hard. I'm gonna sleep Friday night into Saturday morning. I'm halfway through my Sabbath before I wake up on the seventh day. And it's good that it begins with sleep, right? 'Cause sleep is actually your most hatless thing you do, right? Like the most hatless thing is that sleep, right? But that Sabbath sleeps extra special. A lot of people when they start hearing about Sabbath, they pick a day of the week. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like they'll say, like, oh, I'm gonna have a Saturday. Like, okay, when does Saturday start, when does it end? You know, okay, well, midnight to midnight. I'm like, are you up? I'm not necessarily. So you're sleeping through both of those. Okay, so you're trying to take a 36 hour Sabbath. That's actually gonna be hard to keep. You're gonna cheat, right? Pick a 24 hour period. When does it start and end? The Jews would practice Sunday night. I mean, excuse me, Friday night to Saturday night. Sun down, sundown to sundown. I do something like that, five to five. My wife does three to three. She goes home a little early on Friday afternoon. She wants us to start earlier. And man, she gets that laptop out at like three on the dot on Saturday and does a couple of things. You know, that she thought of during that downtime, right? And that's just play time. It's just, I need to, for me, it's just about being off the laptop, not being available via email, not responding to texts from my students, even though I really want to. And you enjoy that, though. The door. I love the work, too. See, that's the thing. We could jump in here, but we're not going to. We could do the, that's a whole separate episode actually in the future. Well, we got five episodes here, right? Yes, we could. What we could do is we could, we could, we could jump in and say the differentiation between the word work, and the word job, and all of that. What I want to get out here is. I'll mention that. I work six days a week. I go to my job five days a week. Right. That distinction alone has been varied, powering. And I think the thing for a lot of people, especially parents, they think, okay, but if I've worked five days of the week, and then over the other two days, I still am. This is the same thing where it's like people have the issue and I did too when they talk about parents being babysitters. You know, where that's, it's a different way of wording it. It's a, again, it's a title or it's a function, not a relationship. And so a lot of people are like, well, if I did keep the Sabbath, no, let me rephrase. They don't think of it as keeping it. They think of it as doing it. And there's a difference there too. What I'm trying to get at here is keeping this Sabbath means, you're not getting in a hyperbolic chamber and sitting there for 24 hours. Oh, no. It's very different from that, but it is different from the rest of the week. Yes. And I want to maybe say, what are some of those differences you see? Well, one thing that I loved is, I heard a rabbi one time talk about he uses a pen a lot. He was a teacher. He graded papers. He was a writer. So he wrote, he hand wrote his first drafts. This is an older time. And this guy told this story, but although I still hand write a lot too. So he used a pen a lot. And he just made a rule for himself that on the Sabbath, he would not touch a pen. I mean, he can't pick up a paintbrush. Doesn't mean, and he even could say, like, I could pick up a pencil and color, color pencils and draw, but I don't use a pen. There's 24 hours a week, I don't use a pen. And now it can sound like really legalistic, but it's only sounds legalistic because it's specific and it's concrete. But it's self-imposed. He found a thing that is almost like a symbol of the work, do you know what I mean? So for me, like, the computer, like that laptop, just that is the thing. I got to stay off that thing, you know? And that's adjusting my actually. My job's changing a little bit, and it might need to be something different. I've been actually conversing with my wife about that, like not responding to texts from students is a new kind of sad thing. I was going to say, my job's become a lot more relational with students. And becoming unavailable to them one day a week, one 24 hour period a week is very powerful. You know, things like that. So it's just kind of learning what those things are. And often it's like one thing. Carbart would say that, he'd say, "What's one thing you step away from and one new thing you add? Just one thing, right?" So what's the one thing I don't permit myself to do for those 24 hours? And now what's that one thing I add that gives life? - I just had the mental picture of-- - It's just Indiana Jones. - Where he grabs the one thing and swaps it with the other. - Oh, perfect. - It's perfect. - Yeah. - It's perfect. - Although it does kind of get down. - It does work. - It's not a good, it's an example of a good mental picture. It's not a good example of it working, but-- - Take it out of context. - Imagine the weight he had gotten the weight better. - Yes, imagine the-- - And again, try on errors. - Try on errors. - Yes. - Try on errors. - So, yes. - Interesting. - Yeah, so there's that swapping in and out, right? And then you put it back. - Yeah. - So, you've already said you and your wife have different time frames here. She's three to three, you're five to five. What about the kids? You've got three kids. How do they factor into that and relationally, especially? - Yeah. Well, I mean, it's in always in flux as they grow older. So this is-- - That's true. Seasonality with them is very key. - Yeah, and then-- - You know, one or middle one just became teenager. And so we're kind of-- we're in transition. So I don't have a lot of insight on that front. But I will say that they're probably aware of our presentness toward them in that time frame. That doesn't go unnoticed. So in that regard, it's felt. - Yeah. - But, you know, as again now that someone's moving in the teen years, they're making their own plans and doing their own things. So again, some of this stuff is under renegotiation and that's part of the point. - But yeah, when they were younger, that Sabbath was a lot of-- quote work, I would be tired at the end of that day because kids are just more draining when they're young, but they were more draining when I was trying to sneak a little bit of work in. So when I started protecting that time, it wasn't as bad. Because actually when you get into a toddler's like way of seeing the world, it's actually kind of fun, right? You just go about the day and you don't run it too rigidly and you're not annoyed that they're interrupting you from the work you're trying to get done. Well, okay, so that's, so that reveals something. I do a lot of manual labor on Saturday. That's when I weed, that's when I mo, that's when I do cleaning projects, you know, again, because I don't think it's, I'm not legalistic about these things, because I don't work with my hands for my job. Right. Same here. So for me, I'm getting out of my head into my body on Saturday, either through athletic sport, activity, or through manual labor. So for me, like, that's crucial on that Saturday, but at a different pace, you know, not running a rigid schedule kind of taking it a little looser. Yeah. It's about flipping those switches. I've said this a million times on the show where it's like when you take a break during the work day, so there's another term that kind of needs to be shot in the foot. You flip all the switches. So if you were at a screen, get off it. If you were being, if you were by yourself, sit stand, social on social, or vice versa, to put you know, so for me, my job, I'm with the people all the time. So I need solitude. Yes. Break in the middle of the day. Yeah. Yeah. So, but this is, this is a, in a 24-hour period and it's more, and again, it's, it's intentionality. Again, it's not legalism. Yeah. It's intentionality. It's, you thought through it and you said, no, it's a symbol of something. Yeah. Yeah. So some people find that that's a great place to start the weekly rhythm. That's where I started, you know, and I started, which is two hours. Yeah. So you walk your way up to it, too. Yeah. See, that's, there you go. It's like, I mean, again, I do metaphor stuff all the time. It's like, you don't just start running. You go for a walk and you go for a walk consistently over time. And then you can pick up the pace a little bit or something along those lines. That's a very rudimentary example. But I also like the idea. Going back to the mana thing, I like that applying that mana mentality, collecting it. For example, my wife drives her nuts. It's like, oh, I've got to think of something for dinner, got to prep the thing, got to this, that get it all together. It's like, you know what? Let's extra batch a little stuff so that we're ready. And then you don't, or since I'm not the one really cooking or even some of the teenage kids in the house aren't cooking, like that's their turn. It's, it's all systematic, but it's integrated and it's familiar even depending upon who you're living with. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, the strict observance, you know, Orthodox Jews do practice double prep meals. So the meals are already ready. Yeah. You don't have to prep the meals on the Sabbath. So that's, I mean, there's actually precedent for that, that notion. So yeah, yeah. I mean, don't please, please, please, don't keep the Sabbath in order to become more productive. That would in fact be not honoring the Sabbath or yourself. But I will mention you will become more productive on your other since days you will. Partially because you'll know when that, that's how it worked out for me is when I have that temptation to go do something to goof off, to do some non restorative procrastination. Because it was actually, I started keeping this Sabbath, again, two hours a week when it started because I was in a procrastination support group because I was in a procrastinators anonymous that I started going to in 2009 because I'd been working on my dissertation and been stuck for eight months. Total writers block was awful. It was hell. It was one of the worst seasons of my life. And I was so depressed and terrified that I'd be exposed and just, it was just awful. And I went and that was like the first thing they said, it says, you need to take two hours a week when you just do something good for your soul that you enjoy doing. And that's not for anybody else. And it's like, dude, I thought I signed up for procrastinators anonymous and you're telling me to goof off more. But it was so transformative because all the sudden, whenever I had that pull that temptation to procrastinate, it was like, oh, no, no, I'll do that during my predetermined time for play, right? So the key is to play. You really got to play on that weekly Sabbath. Well, that is another podcast to cross off your podcast listening to do list. I hope that you enjoyed listening in on this conversation, or at least the first part of it with John Dury and myself. And again, if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned for later this week when part two will drop. And then stay tuned because at some point here, as we're nearing the end of the college semester, he and I are going to craft what is the next probably two part episode because we always sit and talk for a long time. And why not split it into two really focused podcast episodes, right? So if you enjoyed this, share it with somebody you know needs to hear it. Stay tuned for part two, and then parts three and four, I guess, or one and two of a different topic or an extended topic. Later, this spring, early summer. If you want to share the episode, you can hit that share button in your podcast player app of choice where you're listening to this or head on over to the shownotes at beyond thetodewlist.com. Thanks for sharing. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you next episode. [Music]