The night before the Sabbath, I put my computer and monitors to sleep. Not closed for the evening. Asleep until after the Sabbath.
The next morning the desk is still there. I walk past it on the way to the coffee. Most weeks, something on it is pulling at me. A build that is one session from done. A client email I could answer in four minutes. A fix I already know how to make.
That pull shows up every single week. I have kept the Sabbath for years, and it has not gone away. The world around me does not help. Everyone else runs Monday to Friday, nine to five, and then never really unplugs on the weekend either. Some weeks I catch myself wondering whether I am on the right path and keeping His commandments properly, and I take that question to Yahweh instead of Claude.
Then the day opens up. I spend most of the morning with the King James Version of the Bible, unhurried, with nowhere else I need to be. Later, Cash and I head out for a long walk at the Old Koschak Farm.
The rest of the day belongs to people. I call family and reach out to friends. If my hands want something to do, I putz in the garden. Nothing on the clock, nothing that looks like my regular work. Just my hands in the dirt and no one waiting on me.
By the time we are back from the walk, something has shifted. The deadlines that felt urgent at the desk have shrunk to their actual size. The work is still there. It is always still there. It just is not shouting anymore.
Here is what years of this have taught me. The river of work never stops flowing. It was flowing long before I waded in, and it will keep flowing after I step out. My job is not to stand in it every waking hour. My job is to decide when and where to cast.
I call this the River Rule.
The Sabbath I keep follows the moon, not the Saturday-Sunday week. So it does not always land on a weekend. Some weeks it falls on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, a day everyone else treats as a full workday.
When I started, my colleagues and I were sure that would cause problems. Missed calls. Frustrated clients. Lost work. Friends told me flat out that I could not run a business that way.
It had the opposite effect.
Not one client has ever objected. When someone asks why I am unavailable that day, I tell them. The answer is usually some version of “That’s cool” or “Sounds good, let me know when we can talk.” They do not need me any less. The week was simply built to absorb it. My days are themed, which I wrote about in Your calendar is not yours. Clients know when I am working on their business. The Sabbath is not a hole in that structure. It is the beam the rest of the structure hangs from.
It is the same pushback people get when they follow Tim Ferriss’s advice to check email only twice a day at set times. Everyone assumes the world will fall apart. The world adjusts. Most of what feels urgent is just unscheduled.
That is the pattern I see in owner-operators all the time. Not laziness. The opposite. They are always on, always reachable, standing in the river every hour it runs, and they have mistaken that for commitment.
A business that cannot survive one day a week without its owner is not a business yet. It is a job with overhead.
The ceiling those owners hit is not the market. It is that every decision in the company still routes through them, so the business can only grow as large as their waking hours. One day away is the cheapest audit you will ever run. Whatever breaks while you are gone is the next system you need to build.
I want to be honest about the order of things, though. I do not keep the Sabbath for my business. I keep it because it is His appointed time, and the relationship matters more to me than the output. The business benefits came second, and they came as a surprise.
Gary Vaynerchuk likes to remind people not to let work define their self-worth, that it is nowhere near the top of what makes you who you are. I agree with him. One day a week, I get to prove it to myself.
So here is my prescription, and it is not a productivity hack. Keep the Sabbath.
Not a day of your choosing, and not a protected block you hope to grow into one someday. The day He set. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8) is a commandment, not a suggestion. And it comes with permission built in. You are allowed to stop. Every week. Even with a business to run.
Start by finding out when it falls. That is why I am building Remembr, an app that tracks Sabbaths, new moons, and feast days on a modern lunisolar calendar, aligned with the rhythm of heaven and earth. Then get ready the night before. Finish what you can, put the computer to sleep, and let the river run without you. Let your clients know which days you work on their business, and let that structure carry the week. When the day comes, give it to Him, and to the people you love.
The work will be there when you get back. In all my years of doing this, it always has been.
If you want to see how the calendar on your wall drifted from the original, I made a series of short videos that walk through it. And if you want the full case, I wrote it out in Who Set the Clock?
The river will keep flowing. Cast wisely.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription