The Slow Sunday Rule

The rule is this: nothing on Sunday may be scheduled with another person before two o’clock.

That is the whole rule. It is not a digital detox, there is no ritual attached, and we break it perhaps four times a year for things that genuinely cannot move. It has done more for our week than any of the more ambitious things we have tried.

Why that particular rule

We had tried the ambitious versions. A whole day offline, which lasted three weeks. A “no work weekends” policy, which collided with the fact that I am self-employed and some weekends have work in them. A morning routine with six parts, which I abandoned during the first week I overslept.

Every one of those failed the same way: they required me to be a slightly different person, and I kept being the same one.

The Sunday rule does not require me to be anybody. It only stops other people from putting things in a box, and the box turns out to fill itself.

What has grown in it

• Long breakfasts. Actual ones, at the table, sometimes lasting until eleven.
• Reading things on paper, which I had stopped doing entirely and did not notice stopping.
• The bread thing, which I will write about separately, and which has gone better than anyone expected.
• Walking somewhere with no destination, which as an adult you effectively never do unless a rule protects the time.

Nothing we do on a Sunday morning is remarkable. The remarkable part is that the morning is reliably there, which it never was when it was merely intended.

The part that surprised me

It changed Saturdays. Knowing Sunday morning is closed pushed the errands, the admin and the seeing-of-people into Saturday, and Saturday got denser and much more purposeful. I had assumed protecting one morning would cost me somewhere else, and in a narrow sense it does — but the somewhere else got better, not worse, for having a shape.

If you want to try it

Pick a smaller window than you want. Two hours is plenty. Say it out loud to the people who would otherwise schedule you, because a rule you have not told anyone about is just a preference, and preferences lose.