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Areas › Your body › Rest and pacing
Pick one and let it be the whole thing. If it is work, work, and you will usually finish earlier than you expected. If it is rest, shut the laptop, put the phone in another room, and let whatever you are watching actually have you. An hour of each tends to leave people with more of both than three hours of the blend does.
The moment you are freed of one task, work on (Quran 94:7). One thing and then the next, each given its own turn, is the rhythm being described.
الشرح
فَإِذَا فَرَغۡتَ فَٱنصَبۡ
The moment you are freed [of one task] work on
Qur’an 94:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A diary study of evening screen based leisure found it pulled in two directions on the following day's energy: it helped when it let people detach from work, and it cost them when it pushed bedtime later, with the balance depending on how mindful they were about it. So the screen is not the trouble on its own, the way it is used is. Diary studies follow people over days and cannot establish cause.
Liu H, Ji Y, Dust SB. (2021). "Fully recharged" evenings? The effect of evening cyber leisure on next-day vitality and performance through sleep quantity and quality, bedtime procrastination, and psychological detachment, and the moderating role of mindfulness.. The Journal of applied psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Attention split down the middle does neither job, so the work drags and the rest restores nothing.
Rest is not the prize waiting at the end of the work. It is part of what makes the work possible, and it does not have to be earned first.
Say it, out loud if you can manage it: I am done for the day. A decision, rather than a slow guilty drift away from the desk.
There are two jobs here, not one. Free up the time, and then be able to sit in it without feeling like a fraud.