Want to be more productive? Rest

Are you crawling to the finish line? There’s a reason we feel exhausted. As the end of the 2025 work year approaches, our brains are doing what they do best: Attempting to protect us.

And, as is often the case, this protection mechanism has the reverse effect. 

Turns out, our brains pace our energy based on how long a task is expected to last. Finish Line Fatigue is one way our brains try to protect us from overexertion. Runners will be familiar with the feeling: On a 5 km run, your brain starts “turning up” fatigue around 4 km, but if you plan for 10 km, you still feel perfectly fine.

So, at the end of every year, we enter into a battle with our brains – while navigating holiday parties, last-minute deadlines, shopping lists and forced family fun. 
 

A holiday from your holiday

Here’s the kicker: Most of the time, we shut down our computers for the year and immediately open a list of holiday chores. We spend our break ticking off tasks, only to arrive back at the office feeling anything but rested.

It’s a viscous path that leads in one direction: Burnout.

We know our brains are high-performance athletes; they need downtime to perform at their peak. So if you’re someone who finishes every holiday thinking you need another one to recover, this is for you.

Rest is a muscle

If you haven’t seen it yet, we highly recommend spending some of your holiday streaming All Her Fault. What starts as a kidnapping thriller quickly evolves into a study of gender dynamics. It’s an uncomfortable watch, but an important one. 

You, like us, may find yourself wincing. From caregiving and emotional labour, to managing the juggle, the series showcases some of the insidious social conditioning that shapes womanhood in 2025. Rest is a big theme, mainly because none of the women get any.

And neither do many of us. In one of our final expert interviews for 2025, Marko co-founder Vinka Wong challenged our mindsets around the concept. Most of us claim busyness is a problem, but act as though it’s a goal; removing one thing from our plates, only to add two more. 

Until we decide to prioritise ourselves, we will stay stuck in overload. But most of us are beginners in the practice of rest. Quite frankly, we don’t know how to do it, so we need to start small.

How to do nothing

This time last year, we shared 5 ways to embrace downtime. They’re all just as relevant twelve months later, but we wanted to highlight tip number 5: Embrace the micro-pause.

For many of us, the idea of an entire day of downtime may feel impossible. It’s like getting off the couch and entering a marathon. So instead, let’s start small. Protect 5 minutes a day for completely unproductive, chore-free, device-free, multi-tasking-free, rest. 

Your one goal: Take a complete break. Look out the window, lie down, flick through a magazine, sip a delicious drink in the sun or by the fire. Practice proving to yourself that you deserve downtime. 

If current life means even a trip to the toilet is a group activity, try to put physical distance between yourself and your dog/partner/toddler. It’s just 5 minutes, even if you have to wait for nap time. 

If the prospect of rest triggers guilt, use your 5 minutes to sit with those feelings. Remind yourself that it’s ok that you’re not helping with the dishes, packing the car, or picking up the toys… Even if everyone else is.

If you’re not sure what to do, resist the urge to fill your 5 minutes with scrolling or other distractions. Set a timer, then lean back, look up and take some refreshingly deep breaths.

Take a micro-break before you break

We don’t need to tell you that it’s been a big few years. But life is too short, and you’re too important to turn to the next page of your calendar wondering how you’ll find the energy to keep going. 

Sadly, no one is going to hand us a rest on a silver platter. We have to protect our own downtime, so we can show up as our best selves. As Powrsuit expert Rachael Fitzjohn (and every flight attendant) says: You need to put your own oxygen mask on before you can help anyone else.

So take the time to switch off this holiday season. It’s not lazy, it’s a powrful productivity hack.