Rest isn’t wasted time. An afternoon of doing nothing with people you love is one of the best uses of a life.

Rest keeps getting filed as time lost, which is a measurement error. An afternoon on a porch with people you like is not an interruption of a useful life. It is one of the things a useful life is for. The nagging sense that you ought to be achieving something is worth inspecting, because it usually arrived from outside you.

Protect one block of nothing this week and resist improving it. No productive podcast, no errands bolted on. If people are around, let them be around, since doing nothing next to others beats doing nothing alone.