On a small scale I have learned that on a weekly basis, if I have two non Office days in a row, I should anticipate that one will not be productive. Even if I want both to be, even if I fight the tendency toward slothfulness, inevitably one of those two days will be lost to sleep or vegging. I am happier and more productive overall if I accept it instead of fighting. If I allow that upon waking on the first day and feeling exhausted I will not try to push myself, but will relax and rest and do only things that aid those goals, more often than not I actually end up doing a couple of productive things (even if they are not what I feel I need to get done), and I am much more productive on the second day as a result. Conversely, if I am superproductive the first day, I find I will be in a much better position to keep myself going for the next several days if I deliberately set out to rest on the second day.

This may not apply to you, and may not seem like a very large or interesting compromise to others, but for me it is. I have to really push myself to rest on rest days (and I have to push myself not to feel guilty about resting, too). My natural inclination is to push as hard as I can until I lose the energy to go on, and then end up spending everal days doing the bare minimum and feeling terrible about myself. This is neither healthy nor productive.

Even though I feel I am making small progress on the whole business of balancing activity and rest for optimal productivity and well-being, I have a long way to go. Reading about the trials and tribulations of others is encouraging. It helps to remember that I am not the only one who has trouble with this. I don’t know if reading about my struggle will affect you similarly, but I figured it was at least worth a try.

There’s a tangledness to the feeling I would have liked to capture as well, and I feel like you’ve somehow implied it without saying it. It’s like the more you thrash about and struggle in the net of commitments, the more tangled you get. So the solution becomes how best to address what small tangles you can and not to try to pull it all apart as once. (I think.)