I am not good at weekending. I quite often don’t do useful things, even during the week. But setting out to do that in an intentionally restorative—or whatever it is we are trying to achieve here—way, I’m a bit at sea. Perhaps the sense that I’m supposed to be derping around to achieve something in particular makes me nervous, since I can’t really detect the success criteria and thus am probably failing to do it. Or if I conceive of intentional non-work as a ‘reward’ then it feels painfully limited and the possibility of unsatisfaction looms. Whereas if I’m just procrastinatorily being unproductive, there’s a way in which that might be unbounded.
It’s Monday of a long weekend and I worked a bit hard yesterday and the day before on work, and meant to do the same today.
(I always feel like this is uncooperative with the world—people judge themselves next to others, so if we are going to have times of rest, it seems a defection to keep working. But that isn’t the only consideration.)
However in fact it is after 5pm, and writing these paragraphs is the most directly-productive-adjacent thing I have done yet. I have also watched two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, gone out to a cafe with people, shot some orcs in VR, done half a crossword, chatted extensively, helped organize a social thing, nearly-napped for a while, all while intending to start work sometime soon…just, you know, when the time seemed right. Which has been nice.
I wonder a bit if this is as good as it gets with ‘relaxation’, without making some fundamental change to my relationship to it—such as actually understanding what it is I’m trying to achieve and being able to reliably detect it. Unstressed by relaxation goals, a nice long bout of relaxed procrastination.
It sounds like you were actually trying to optimize for two goals simultaneously, where one goal is "intentionally restorative" and the other is "productive"? Framed that way, it would not be surprising if the result is meh on both counts. Never half-ass two things, and all that.