Without ever intending for it to happen, many people find themselves caught up in the modern-day whirlwind of activity and overload. Our culture is defined by go-go-go and despite being blessed with many labor-saving devices, these only serve to actually make us even more busy — for the faster we’re able to get things done, the more we take on, and the more we take on, the more we have to do, increasing our busyness factor to even greater levels than before.

In many ways, this type of lifestyle has created a “culturally induced ADD” — sending you off every which way, promising to fill your life with lots of action but not much substance. The constant go-go-go gives a false sense of accomplishment that you are doing stuff, but despite all of the hullabaloo, at the end of it you’re not left with much.

Sadly enough, it doesn’t look like we can turn to modern society for help and technology has only proven to exacerbate the problem. The solution, surprisingly, can be found in the wisdom from societies and teachings of centuries past and is accomplished by setting apart one day per week that is dedicated as a “day of rest.”

In the Judeo-Christian world for example, their day of rest is the Sabbath � one day out of seven devoted to rest, reflection and recommitment. In the Buddhist tradition they practice Uposatha a similar concept where one day per week is set apart for “the cleansing of the defiled mind,” resulting in inner joy.

Whether you are religious, spiritual, or atheist it doesn’t matter — all can benefit from the principle behind this practice.

Automobiles and machines in general do not function at their optimal levels unless they are regularly tuned up. Our body, mind, heart, and spirit follows the same principle. It has been proven many times over that constantly pushing yourself only leads to burnout, breakdown and eventual disease. The ever-increasing pace of our modern society is only making this deterioration pass by quicker. The solution is to give ourselves regular “tune-ups” by making the habit of setting aside our own personal day of rest. A Sabbath day if you will.

So what exactly do you do on a day of rest? Do you just loaf around all day or sleep the day through? Well, maybe if that’s what you need. But perhaps you’ll have a better idea of what you might decide to do if I share with you some of the activities that are part of my weekly “tune-up.”

Here are some of the things I like to do on my day of rest:

• Reflect on the week gone by.
• Plan for the upcoming week.
• Review prior goals and set new ones.
• Read in the “wisdom literature” of the past.
• Visit relatives
• Enjoy “quiet time” in nature by myself or with my family.
• Meditate or pray
• Take a nap (however, since doing Polyphasic sleeping, this has become a regular activity)

All in all, your day or rest should be a day to leave the week behind you. To stop working or even thinking about work. It should be a different day from all the rest. One that you look forward to with excitement and expectation. It’s a day to stop looking to the outside world for distraction or entertainment. It’s a day to be quiet, to sit back and reflect on all the gifts and blessings of your life and the things which you take for granted. It’s a day for nature and beauty and spirituality; a day for family, friends and God.

A day of rest doesn’t affect us only when we are resting. It spills over into our weeks, our months, and our entire lives. Even the most difficult of weeks becomes tolerable because you know that this day is just over the horizon.

If you make the habit of doing this regularly, I promise that it will improve your health, strengthen your relationships, sharpen your mind and revive your spirit. That’s a lot to promise, I know. But that is the power of your day of rest.

get home bag

While scanning the web last night, I found a particularly useful productivity tool called the Concrete Goals Tracker.

David Seah — designer-extraordinaire and fellow New England resident — has created a great series of free productivity tools called the ‘Printable CEO’ that aid in your high-level goal setting, time tracking, and task tracking efforts.

In his studies of leadership and excellence, David discovered a simple question asked by the most successful executives in business: What can I do to add value to my company? This question would later inspire him to go in search of his own personal CEO.

For David (as well as us), hiring his own personal CEO to run his life was just not realistic, so he designed the next best thing: a ‘printable CEO’ to motivate his business development activities. The Concrete Goals Tracker was built off of the idea that if a task at hand doesn’t add value to your bottom-line (whatever that might be to you personally) then do something else that does.

The first component of the Concrete Goals Tracker is designed around a list of tasks that contribute to achieving your goals. Weighted points (10, 5, 2, and 1) are assigned to each task which reflect their power in moving you closer to accomplishing those goals. Lower weights are given to tasks that you do frequently (with the assumption that you don’t need the extra motivation) while higher weights reflect those tasks that are more difficult or require more effort or motivation to accomplish.

The second component is centered around a weekly progress chart that has these fill-in bubbles that you can use with a No.2 pencil (similar to those ScanTron tests that we had in high school). The different bubbles are labeled with the weights that correspond with the previous list.

Whenever something on the list is accomplished, you fill in the respective bubbles and add them up in the final column for the day. The benefit comes when you set some minimum level for that day like, “Today I’ll make 6 points.” When you reach or exceed that number you know that you’ve had a good day. This is also easy to track your progress over the course of a week or a month and you get visual confirmation that you are making headway on your goals.

I find this particularly appealing over the standard to-do list because of the absence of the guilt-factor. It seems that whenever I make a daily to-do list and don’t accomplish everything on it, I feel terrible. However, with the Concrete Goals Tracker it lends to a sense of achievement because you’re focusing on the progress you’ve made and what you’ve accomplished instead of what you haven’t.

So how can you apply this tool in your life? Well, there are many options. If you’re a freelancer or small business owner, you can leverage the existing freelancer or small-business owner PDF versions that David has created. Otherwise, if you’re like me and want to apply this to other areas of your life you can customize your own through either the the Excel version or the editable PDF version. For example, if you’re a blogger one of your goals might be to increase your feed subscribers to 2000. So you would assign point values to tasks/results that help you accomplish this. A 10-point result could be guest blogging on another blogger’s site. A 5-point task might be writing a blog article; 2-points could be commenting on someone else’s blog and 1-point might be responding to comments on your own blog.

Another example might be with your health & fitness goals. Perhaps a 10-point result would be losing 5 pounds. You might earn 5 points by exercising or going the whole day without eating any junk food. 2 points might be when you drink 8 glasses of water a day and 1 point might be simply taking the stairs instead of the elevator. The whole point is that you could apply this simple system to many different areas of your life.

David has created a number of cool tools in various formats that you can download by checking out his Printable CEO Series.

For the next ten days I’ll be applying the 10-Day Experiment to the Concrete Goals Tracker to see if it’s worth continuing. Be sure to check back to see my results!