Switch It Off: The Case for a Digital Sabbath
I wrote a book called 'Switch it On!', so the irony of this article’s title is not lost on me. But the longer I mentor busy professionals, the more convinced I become that the two instructions are the same instruction. Most people cannot switch on what matters to them because nothing in their week is ever properly off.
By off, I mean a digital sabbath, one day a week or a defined block of it, with no work email, no news, no social platforms and the phone somewhere that requires standing up and walking. The practice is old and slightly unfashionable. I have come to read that as a recommendation.
An Availability Audit
In my Passion Project Audit piece, I suggested tracking a week in 30-minute blocks to find your unaccounted hours. The digital version is blunter. Count how many of your waking hours you are reachable. For most professionals, the honest answer is all of them, and it has been all of them for years, since roughly the day work email arrived on a personal phone without anyone deciding anything.
Constant reachability has a cost that does not appear in any one moment. Attention kept permanently on call is attention that never fully lands anywhere: on the report, the conversation, the dog, the meal. The result is a week that was continuously busy and strangely unmemorable: email checked at a child’s swimming lesson, and afterwards, no clear memory of the swimming lesson.
What One Day Off the Grid Involves
The version I recommend is Saturday afternoon into Sunday morning, phone in a drawer. Calls still reach you for anything urgent, because a phone that can ring is different from a phone that can scroll. Everything else waits.
Expect the first three or four attempts to be unpleasant. You reach for the absent phone at every idle moment, which teaches you how many idle moments you had been selling off, one glance at a time. Somewhere in the second month, the reaching stops, and the day develops a different texture. Longer stretches of one thing. Books finished rather than sampled. Conversations that run past the point where a notification would once have ended them.
Two rules do most of the work. The day must be scheduled and recurring, because a sabbath renegotiated weekly loses every negotiation. And it needs a physical component: phone in a drawer beats phone in a pocket on silent, by a margin that embarrasses everyone’s belief in their own willpower.
The Professional Case
I resist selling rest as a productivity technique, because a sabbath measured by Monday’s output is still on-call time. But judgement is the asset in consulting, and distance is what sharpens it. Problems carried over from a working week look different after a day away from the feed. The pattern-spotting that clients pay for happens more readily in a mind that has been somewhere else. Boards value the person in the room who is not reactive, and non-reactivity is trained, mostly by practising being unreachable and discovering that the world carries on.
My working life has spanned Australia, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, so I know the time-zone version of the reachability argument well. If a full day is unworkable in your role, and that claim deserves more scepticism than it usually gets, start with a repeatable half-day and defend it like a client meeting. Tell the few people who might need you how to reach you. Then let the phone sit in its drawer and find out what your attention does when nobody can bid for it.
The book title stands, subtitle included: Activate Your Personal Potential. The off switch turns out to be where the activation starts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is a Digital Sabbath?
A recurring weekly period, commonly one day, spent without email, news and social platforms. Calls stay available for genuine emergencies. The point is a scheduled stretch where your attention is not available for bidding, rather than total disconnection.
How Long Should a Digital Sabbath Be?
Long enough that you stop reaching for the phone, which for most people means at least half a day. A full day weekly is the standard worth working toward. Consistency matters more than length: the same block, every week, defended like an appointment.
What If My Job Requires Me to Be Reachable?
Stay reachable for the channel emergencies actually use, which is a phone call, and switch off the rest. Few roles require inbox and feed monitoring on a Saturday. Tell key people how to reach you, then test the assumption. It usually survives.
About The Author
Monique Chelin is the author of ‘Enzo Finds His Friends’ and ‘Switch it On!’, with 100% of author profits supporting RSPCA Australia and Opportunity International Australia, where she has been an Ambassador since 2010. She is also a Brisbane-based sustainability consultant, board director (GAICD), and founder of MJC Sustainability, advising mining, infrastructure and government organisations on ESG risk. Connect with Monique at mjcsustainability.com.
