I worked 80-hour weeks. Now I keep the Sabbath.

For a stretch of my twenties, I worked 80-hour weeks. I was early in my career at Missouri State University, and I genuinely thought that was what dedication looked like. It was slowly killing me – not as a figure of speech. My body and my mind were both telling me, in ways I kept overriding, that I couldn't keep going like that.

So I stopped. When I left that job I became an eight-to-five, Monday-through-Friday person, and I've stayed that way ever since. Even now, running my own business – where everyone assumes you're grinding at 2am to keep up – I've kept the boundary. I don't work nights. I don't work weekends. And one day a week, I rest completely.

We treat Sunday as the Sabbath in our house. If you're not religious, stay with me – I'm not here to preach. I've just come to think the fourth commandment, "Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy," is one of the most practical instructions ever written, and most of us in the West quietly ignore it to our own harm.

We are genuinely bad at resting

The thing I keep running into, in myself and in nearly everyone I talk to, is that we don't know how to stop. There's always one more thing. One more email, one more idea, one more "let me just check." Rest gets treated as the reward you earn once the work is done – and the work is never done, so the rest never comes.

But rest isn't the reward for good work. It's a precondition for it. When I don't rest, I'm less creative and I think less clearly. I do worse work and I don't even notice, because the same depletion that lowers the quality also lowers my ability to see it. You can't tell you're dull when you're dull.

You already know this everywhere except your own life. You'd never run a server at 100% CPU and expect it to stay healthy – you leave headroom, because a system with no slack falls over the moment anything unexpected shows up. People are no different. The slack is the Sabbath. You're just not giving it to yourself.

The part that's harder to say

There's a second reason I keep the Sabbath, and it's less comfortable to write down.

Resting one full day a week forces me to admit that my success isn't entirely my own doing. When I stop – when the work sits untouched for a day and the world keeps turning – I'm reminded how much of where I am came from things I didn't earn. Where I was born. The people who invested in me. Plain good fortune. I believe God has provided for my family in ways I couldn't have engineered, and the Sabbath is how I practice remembering that instead of quietly taking all the credit.

You don't have to share my faith to feel the weight of it. Anyone honest about their own success knows it isn't a clean line from effort to outcome. A day of rest is a small, repeated act of humility – a way of holding your work with an open hand instead of a clenched fist.

What it actually does

When I protect that day, a few things happen, reliably. I come back to Monday recharged instead of already behind. My work is better, not worse, for the missing hours. I have time for the people in my life, which turns out to be where most of the meaning lives. And I stay a little humbler about the whole enterprise, which makes me easier to be around and better to work with.

None of that shows up on a productivity dashboard. All of it compounds.

Something to try this week

Take one full day off. A real one – no "just checking," no small tasks smuggled in around the edges. Put the laptop somewhere you can't see it. Then notice what your next working day feels like.

My guess is you'll do more in six days than you were doing in seven. I did. And I stopped wondering whether the rest was worth it right around the time I stopped feeling like the work was killing me.

– Matthew