My personal Sabbath-like thing is days when I have doctors’ appointments (I have them fairly often for medical reasons), which work as follows:
I take the train to the doctors’ office; this takes about two hours. In this time, I read a book or play Solitaire. Since there is no wifi on the BART, I can’t use it. After the appointment, I have made arrangements to see one or two friends whom I don’t normally get to see. I sometimes have to wait between the appointment and seeing friends, in which case I get to enjoy a leisurely cup of tea at Starbucks. I do permit myself use of Tumblr at this time, since I have carefully pruned my Tumblr feed to only consist of things I find relaxing, and I spend most of my Tumblr time pretending to be a baby-obsessed space alien, which is a somewhat noncentral use of social media; I find having a deadline by which I have to stop using it tends to reduce the compulsive nature of social media. No work is allowed, however, and if I find myself idly refreshing I go back to the book.
I think one of the virtues of my Sabbath-like thing is that no willpower is required. It’s all the environment: of course I’m going to see friends when I’ve made plans to do so; the doctor’s appointment is fifteen minutes from the BART station, so of course I have to take a pleasant walk; if there’s no wifi, I have no choice but to read. I think that’s something to consider in personal Sabbath design.
Making it physically difficult or impossible to do the things you don’t want to do is definitely a good idea; I deleted a number of apps from my phone, including all the games and social media, for exactly that reason, and I smile every time I notice I would have opened one but didn’t because it wasn’t there.
My experience is hard, clear rules, once you get used to following them, rapidly require less willpower, especially as I engineer around those rules. Not buying things was hard the first few weeks, but after that I started figuring out what I needed to buy in advance, etc etc.
My personal Sabbath-like thing is days when I have doctors’ appointments (I have them fairly often for medical reasons), which work as follows:
I take the train to the doctors’ office; this takes about two hours. In this time, I read a book or play Solitaire. Since there is no wifi on the BART, I can’t use it. After the appointment, I have made arrangements to see one or two friends whom I don’t normally get to see. I sometimes have to wait between the appointment and seeing friends, in which case I get to enjoy a leisurely cup of tea at Starbucks. I do permit myself use of Tumblr at this time, since I have carefully pruned my Tumblr feed to only consist of things I find relaxing, and I spend most of my Tumblr time pretending to be a baby-obsessed space alien, which is a somewhat noncentral use of social media; I find having a deadline by which I have to stop using it tends to reduce the compulsive nature of social media. No work is allowed, however, and if I find myself idly refreshing I go back to the book.
I think one of the virtues of my Sabbath-like thing is that no willpower is required. It’s all the environment: of course I’m going to see friends when I’ve made plans to do so; the doctor’s appointment is fifteen minutes from the BART station, so of course I have to take a pleasant walk; if there’s no wifi, I have no choice but to read. I think that’s something to consider in personal Sabbath design.
Making it physically difficult or impossible to do the things you don’t want to do is definitely a good idea; I deleted a number of apps from my phone, including all the games and social media, for exactly that reason, and I smile every time I notice I would have opened one but didn’t because it wasn’t there.
My experience is hard, clear rules, once you get used to following them, rapidly require less willpower, especially as I engineer around those rules. Not buying things was hard the first few weeks, but after that I started figuring out what I needed to buy in advance, etc etc.