Feierabend

Epistemic status: n=1, an ongoing experiment, describing a practice rather than a result.

AI use: Claude fact-checked the links and the etymology, found the labour-law and etymology sources, wrote the footnotes, and proofread grammar and phrasing. The text is mine.

Feierabend (German, literally "celebration evening"): "done with the work for the day" or "free time after work".

Germans have an interesting concept called Feierabend, which I have been exploring recently.

Currently I don't have fixed working hours and, as I like to joke, I work both never and always. It is a weird thing, but on the one hand I don't have to work at any point in time, on the other hand I might be working at weird times (like Christmas evening). Another huge disadvantage for me is that it is hard to detach from work, since you could be working right now.And the worst part of the experience, which actually forced me to explore the Feierabend approach, is when I don't feel like working (e.g. tired or not feeling well), but then I feel guilty that I should be working and end up not fully enjoying my free time without being productive either. It is like a half-baked state in which I am not doing anything productive (e.g. scrolling), but I am also not doing the most enjoyable thing I could be doing right now, since I feel guilty that I am supposed to be working now.

Germans seem to have this idea that once you are done with work, it is over and you can just enjoy yourself - i.e. the boundary between work and not-work is very well defined, sharp, and intentionally preserved. E.g. German working-time law requires 11 uninterrupted hours of non-work time at the end of the working day.

In a sense this reminds me of "work hard, play hard" (but this one is more about intensity in both parts, not the separation between them) and Working yourself ragged is not a virtue.

In my case, I have decided that I will be productive in the first part of the day (currently until 4 pm, as an experiment) - this means I actively avoid scrolling and distractions. After 4 pm, even if I could work more, I stop and do something else.It is OK to work after that if I really intrinsically desire it, e.g. something I am really curious to finish.

If I am not feeling well, I would move the 4 pm cutoff. E.g. I could be productive for 1 hour just to do the most important tasks and then declare Feierabend (it does not have to be in the evening) and rest. Or I could take the entire day off.

It also feels like I changed my approach to work a bit and stopped overly optimizing for efficiency. E.g. I really enjoy that with the 4 pm approach there is no need to super-optimize the order of tasks. Previously I would delay less intensive, non-cognitive tasks to later in the day, so that I could work on the most important cognitive tasks while freshest. But I suspect that my bottleneck is not the freshness of my cognition, but just interest in the task and the ability to avoid distractions. So now if I want to do some chores first thing in the day, that's fine, and I am still able to work on harder cognitive tasks later in the day (previously I would probably get distracted and get stuck).

Etymology

When researching this post, I stumbled upon the etymology of the word. According to German Wikipedia, since the 12th century the word meant the eve of a holiday (which makes sense based on the literal translation), and after the 16th century it was reinterpreted "unter dem Einfluss der Sprache der Handwerker" (under the influence of the craftsmen's language) to mean the evening rest after work. Pfeifer's Etymologisches Wörterbuch (via DWDS) dates Feierabend in the sense of "abendliche Ruhezeit nach dem Arbeitstag" (evening rest after the working day) to the 16th century and contrasts it with Middle High German vīrābent, "Vorabend eines Festtages" (eve of a feast day).

1. The research term for this is "psychological detachment": mentally switching off from work while away from it. Failing to detach predicts strain and burnout on its own, independent of hours worked. Sonnentag, S. and Fritz, C. (2015), Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework, Journal of Organizational Behavior 36(S1), S72-S103, https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1924
2. Arbeitszeitgesetz, section 5(1): after the end of the daily working time, employees must have "eine ununterbrochene Ruhezeit von mindestens elf Stunden" (an uninterrupted rest period of at least eleven hours). https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbzg/__5.html
3. Nate Soares, 21 June 2015, part of his Replacing Guilt series: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pFatcKW3JJhTSxqAF
4. Cal Newport described the same rule in 2008 as "fixed-schedule productivity": choose the work hours first, then "do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule". https://calnewport.com/fixed-schedule-productivity-how-i-accomplish-a-large-amount-of-work-in-a-small-number-of-work-hours/
5. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feierabend and https://www.dwds.de/wb/Feierabend (Etymologie section, from Wolfgang Pfeifer's Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen). English Wiktionary also lists the obsolete sense "the evening before a holiday, eve": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Feierabend