I’ve made these comments previously, but for purposes of having at least one official review:
I think the names aren’t optimal. Zombie days or Slug days or some-such seem like an improvement for “recovery days.” I think it’s also possible that Rest day might be more unambiguous if it were called a “Restorative day” or somethjing.
I think the post doesn’t quite call enough attention to “this is specifically about listening to your gut. Your gut is a specific part of your body. Listening to it is a skill you might not have. Listening to it is a useful source of information that you might not otherwise be in tune with.” I missed that the first time around and had to have it explained to me by Qiaochu. .
Followup work:
As I told Val in a similarly meta-genre’d post last year, I think it’s fine for individual posts to not be super rigorous. But, it’s good for ideas to go through a longterm process where eventually we check in on them more thoroughly. So, some things I’d like to see someone look at someday:
How many people actually tried “aiming for true Rest days”? How many of those people actually found something valuable out of it? This post makes intuitive sense to me, but it seems like the sort of domain I expect people to overgeneralize and confuse themselves over. I’d like at least some sense of the strength of the anecdata.
I’ve tried to do Restorative days sometimes. I got some value from it, and I’ve seen enough people claim value from various Sabbath-activities that there’s probably something there. But, how often and how long do the Rest days actually need to be? (Obviously one size may not fit all. But I suspect we can get a lot more/better data on what the typical use case actually is like and what works best as a starting point.
I’d also like to see the “listen to your gut?” concept fleshed out into a more concrete hypothesis.
I agree about the names. ‘Rest’ days are particularly confusing, since recovery days involve a lot of rest. A main characteristic of ‘rest’ days instead seems to doing what you feel like and following your gut.
I’ve made these comments previously, but for purposes of having at least one official review:
I think the names aren’t optimal. Zombie days or Slug days or some-such seem like an improvement for “recovery days.” I think it’s also possible that Rest day might be more unambiguous if it were called a “Restorative day” or somethjing.
I think the post doesn’t quite call enough attention to “this is specifically about listening to your gut. Your gut is a specific part of your body. Listening to it is a skill you might not have. Listening to it is a useful source of information that you might not otherwise be in tune with.” I missed that the first time around and had to have it explained to me by Qiaochu. .
Followup work:
As I told Val in a similarly meta-genre’d post last year, I think it’s fine for individual posts to not be super rigorous. But, it’s good for ideas to go through a longterm process where eventually we check in on them more thoroughly. So, some things I’d like to see someone look at someday:
How many people actually tried “aiming for true Rest days”? How many of those people actually found something valuable out of it? This post makes intuitive sense to me, but it seems like the sort of domain I expect people to overgeneralize and confuse themselves over. I’d like at least some sense of the strength of the anecdata.
I’ve tried to do Restorative days sometimes. I got some value from it, and I’ve seen enough people claim value from various Sabbath-activities that there’s probably something there. But, how often and how long do the Rest days actually need to be? (Obviously one size may not fit all. But I suspect we can get a lot more/better data on what the typical use case actually is like and what works best as a starting point.
I’d also like to see the “listen to your gut?” concept fleshed out into a more concrete hypothesis.
I agree about the names. ‘Rest’ days are particularly confusing, since recovery days involve a lot of rest. A main characteristic of ‘rest’ days instead seems to doing what you feel like and following your gut.
In my experience, a day off is most likely to improve energy levels and motivation if it is spent doing outdoor exercise.
On the other hand, spending one hour a day on outdoor exercise is more effective than spending one day a week on exercise.