The Three-Gear Life: Rest, Recreation, Work

How to become real creators, professionals and happy humans.

Adrian Stanek, Stoic Tech Leadership Mentor

Hello fellows. Let’s talk about the three stages we’re in. Well, there’s a fourth stage too, procrastination, but I don’t want to talk about that today. Not here and not in the video :)

So, we’re talking about rest, recreation, and work. These are the three stages you’re supposed to be in if you want to progress, and if you want to create.

You close your laptop at 22:17. Slack is finally quiet; Pipeline is green. Yet your brain still feels like a tab spinning in the background. So you open Steam “just for one round”. Three hours later, you’re in bed, phone in hand, scrolling through patch notes you don’t even care about. You wake up groggy, slam espresso, and promise yourself you’ll be productive today. And the loop repeats.

In 1-on-1s, I hear the same story, just with different logos.

Leaders: “I’m always on, but never really on.”

Coaches: “I teach balance, yet my weekends are shallow Netflix trenches.”

Senior engineers: “My ticket board is still full; my energy bar is red.”

Different symptoms; same root. We treat recreation like rest, and rest like waste. We merged two separate gears into one sloppy compromise. The result is a life that looks efficient on a dashboard, but feels like walking through Jello.

Here’s the model that fixes it, and I’m going to keep it very simple: rest is maintenance, recreation is where your usable energy comes back, and work is where you create, which means work costs energy. If you don’t understand that sequence, you’ll spend years trying to force output from an empty system.

Rest is maintenance, not just “more energy”

Rest is the first stage, and most people misunderstand its purpose. Rest is not mainly about “getting energy back”, that’s the side effect. The primary objective is to maintain your body and mind, and that is very important to understand. If you don’t give it to your body regularly, you will basically die at some point, or at least you will get sick. That’s why we need sleep.

Your subconscious mind is sorting thoughts, progressing thoughts, and boiling them down into actual memories. Your body is detoxifying, healing, and fighting disease. That’s the core job of rest. Yes, you wake up with more physical energy, but that’s not the main point. The point is: the system gets repaired.

Recreation is where energy becomes available

“Recreation is the phase where you do something that gives you back energy by unblocking the energy you already have”

The actual energy you can use comes from recreation. Recreation is the phase where you do something that gives you back energy by unblocking the energy you already have. You have energy as a human being, even though people often don’t think that way, but it’s true. Most people don’t lack energy; they lack access to it.

Recreation is what I’m doing right now when I’m outside in a lovely scenery, like Center Parcs Bostalsee, walking around, letting my mind breathe.

For me, it’s archery. It can be fitness. It can be a walk or a run. It can be writing.

It can even be computer games if you do it for recreation and not as a numbing. These things unblock you, they give you new energy, they bring you back into creativity.

You are exposed to external agendas; we will come to that point in detail, but this agenda pressures you with deadlines and the intentions of others for you. It’s NOT your choice, it’s what you are supposed to do. That drains energy, that blocks you in so many ways. Expectations, fears, and manipulation, just to name a few.

You should do recreation, with limits, of course, but you should do it. The key is to bake it into your routine. Several hours a day is not crazy; it’s normal if you want to create consistently.

💡Make sure fitness, in what way, becomes a part of this recreation phase. Find something that actually brings you joy. That is of utter importance. It must become part of your baseline; otherwise, your inner strength and health will decrease in a way that you cannot really keep up what is to come in 3) Work …

Work is creation, and creation costs energy, but it’s absolutely necessary.

“That’s where you do the actual stuff you’re supposed to do as a human being”

What have you thought is the meaning of life? 😀

Then there’s work. That’s where you actually create things. That’s where you do the actual stuff you’re supposed to do as a human being.

We are creators.

We create life, we create things, we create systems, we create art, we create outcomes, and we should do that.

Because if we’re not in progress, we won’t be happy, and that is a foundational problem of our life. Happiness doesn’t come from recreation! It’s not coming from resting or procrastinating. It is only coming from real-life progress. From changing who you are to making your potential reality.

That’s something I’ve learned for myself, and I’ve seen it in mentoring again and again.

Yes, working is hard! It consumes what you've got and will NEVER stop doing that 😀

Creating costs energy, which is why you need rest and recreation. You need to maintain the system, unblock the energy, and then you can actually use it. If you can’t, you get the usual symptoms: no concentration, blank page, and as soon as the external pressure drops, your motivation drops with it.

That’s not a character flaw; that’s an empty battery.

Pace control, and why “burnout” is most often exhaustion

People often think the problem is work. It can be, especially in externally agenda-heavy companies, but often it’s not. It’s the pace and the missing downshifts. Work on that pace before you make other decisions.

💡Stoic mindset: Always stay in your circle of control. Changing companies is an action you can do, but not control. You don’t know what will come. Changing companies must be done if the current situation hurts you, but you really need to do what you can control before that decision – that is, controlling your pace and limits. Or, in simpler words, develop your discipline.

Here’s the simple rule:

Cruise most days.

Sprint rarely.

Full-stop on purpose.

Cruise means ~70% throttle, repeatable forever. This is where discipline lives and where real consistency is built. And this is why you need to set your own baseline, not to hit record highs daily. Keep it lower, but doable DAILY. Even if you are sick or have other reasons not to run your daily marathon 😀

Sprint means ~95% throttle, short and intentional. Think 48–72 hours: incidents, launches, deadlines. You plan the edges, extra rest before, extra recreation after. Don’t skip that. Research why you have had that need to sprint and retake control. Reflect and adapt so that you need fewer sprints in the future. Something you can at least influence.

Full-stop means zero throttle, zero guilt. Proper sleep. Airplane-mode walks. Family time. Your time. Non-negotiable.

Most burnout I see is not burnout. It’s exhaustion. Exhaustion is a signal. It means you need to take care of rest levels and recreation levels.

Your agenda vs the external agenda

There is another layer people don’t talk about enough: your agenda. When you have only an external agenda, corporate pressure, a boss, and constant expectations, you lose energy faster because, as soon as you create for someone else, you expend energy.

That’s normal. Maslow’s pyramid is real; you need to earn a living, so you will always have some external agenda. But you need balance. You need enough of your own agenda to feel free and meaningful; otherwise, everything feels shallow.

So yes, rest. Yes, recreation. And if you keep exhausting yourself, you also need to change the circumstances at some point. Change the environment.

👉 Because you cannot out-discipline a broken setup forever. That is your no-control circle. Stop wasting energy you never get back.

A day that alternates gears

Here’s a simple example day that alternates gears on purpose: wake without alarm (rest), coffee and journal (transition), walk in the forest with the podcast off (recreation), deep work block (work), training or fitness (recreation), second focused block (work), low stimulus break, maybe a nap (rest), review and pairing (work), then family, cooking, board games, reading (recreation), screens off, downshift, sleep (rest).

Notice the alternation. Short cycles. That’s the point.

The sharp distinction line

Rest restores capacity by doing less; recreation restores capacity by doing something meaningful. Especially important: recreation can unblock energy even when you slept well.

If it’s challenge, learning, social sparkle, or solitude you enjoy, it’s recreation.

If it’s a passive, numbing, algorithmic feed, it’s procrastination wearing recreation’s hoodie.

Call the impostor out 😀

The sticky sentence

Your life needs three gears: rest to recover, recreation to recharge, work to create, and pace control to switch gears on purpose. Say it in your next retro. Say it to your kids at dinner. Say it to yourself when Sunday anxiety hits.

Procrastination – Rest, Recreation, and Preparation in Disguise

Okay … I will write about procrastination again 😀 Because Resistance needs to be fought wherever I can.

There is a fourth state people slip into all the time, and it looks harmless.

Procrastination often pretends to be rest.

Sometimes it pretends to be recreation.

Occasionally, it even pretends to be preparation for work. You know, when you read books, how to start your business next year. But you actually listen to podcasts on how to optimize your not-yet-existing business. Don’t do that. Talk to me, I can help you. Really.

It is none of those.

Procrastination is what happens when you avoid choosing a gear.

You are not resting properly, because your nervous system never downshifts.

You are not recreating properly because there is no challenge, no joy, no feedback. And you are not preparing, because nothing actually gets clearer.

Doom scrolling is not rest. Random videos are not recreation. Endless note-taking without action is not preparation.

The difference is uncomfortable and straightforward: real rest repairs you, real recreation energizes you, real preparation reduces friction for action. Procrastination does none of that. It only delays the moment you have to commit.

If you catch yourself saying “I’m not ready yet”, ask one clean question:
Which gear am I actually in right now?

Then choose deliberately. Even choosing rest on purpose breaks the spell.

TL;DR

Three gears. Rest is maintenance. Recreation is the unlock. Work is creation. Cruise most days. Sprint rarely. Full-stop always. If you feel “burned out”, check the simple thing first. It’s often not burnout; it’s exhaustion. Take care of the rest. Take care of recreation. And when you have enough energy again, change the environment if the external agenda is crushing you.

Think about that. Enjoy the day. Goodbye.

—Adrian