Labor Day was born as a tribute to the American worker. It was a day carved out of the calendar to step away from work and rest. More than a century later, the irony is hard to miss. Many of us still can’t step away, even on the holiday created for that very purpose. Our phones buzz. Email keeps coming. The news never stops. Social media keeps tugging at us, whether we’re at our desks or stretched out in a hammock.
This Labor Day, I want to make the case for a different kind of rest. It has less to do with cookouts and more to do with how we manage our attention on the holiday itself and during the workweek that follows. For me, it comes down to two things: checking communication at deliberate times so we can single-task more often and protecting real solitude. These aren’t indulgences. They’re practical ways to get back something modern work quietly takes from us: an undivided mind.
The Myth of “Staying on Top of It”
Most professionals don’t check email four or five times a day. Research shows that we check email over 70 times a day. Then add texts, phone alerts, and Microsoft Teams and before long, we’re interrupting ourselves all day long. Each check feels harmless … just a glance, just a second, but our brains don’t experience it that way.
Every time you leave focused work to look at a message, then return, you pay a switching cost. Your attention doesn’t snap back into place. Some of the interruption follows you. Do that often enough and you’re no longer switching tasks, but instead you’re working in fragments. You can finish an eight or ten-hour day exhausted and still wonder what you actually accomplished. Worse, you weren’t fully present for yourself, your clients, your colleagues, or the people waiting for you at home.
In my book Tame the Digital Chaos, I teach a simple countermeasure: batch processing. Instead of reacting to email and messages the moment they arrive, set specific times (maybe four or five times a day) to process them with focus. Outside those windows, turn off notifications and minimize the inbox and Teams. Protect the rest of your day for single-tasking: the kind of connected thinking that moves your best work forward.
This isn’t about being less responsive or less available. It’s about being intentional instead of reactive. Batch processing can make you more productive, but that’s not the only benefit. It’s also a form of self-care. It gives your nervous system permission to stop waiting for the next ping.
Alone in the Room, But Never Alone
Constant checking has another cost, one that goes beyond productivity. Computer scientist and author Cal Newport explores it in one of my favorite books Digital Minimalism. He calls it solitude deprivation: spending almost no time truly alone with your own thoughts.
Here’s the part that gets me: you can be solitude-deprived while sitting by yourself. Newport’s definition isn’t about whether another person is in the room or not. It’s about whether your mind is free from other people’s voices, opinions, and demands. Today, all of that arrives through the smartphone glued to your hand. If you sit alone on the porch this Labor Day but check your phone every few minutes, you aren’t really alone! Someone else’s words, requests, and highlight reels still occupy your mind. You’ve handed your inner life over to your device.
That matters because solitude is not a luxury. It’s where we finally hear ourselves think. It’s where we process emotions, work through problems in the background, and form our own opinions instead of absorbing everyone else’s. Without that quiet, anxiety and reactivity creep in. The mind never gets enough room to sort through what it’s carrying.
Lincoln’s Cottage
Newport uses Abraham Lincoln as an example. Lincoln did not spend all of his time at the White House. He regularly stayed at a cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, a few miles outside Washington, D.C. It was quieter there, away from the visitors, petitioners, and pressure of the capital. Lincoln commuted to the White House and used his time at the cottage to think, read, and wrestle with decisions that would shape the country, including the Emancipation Proclamation. Captain David Derickson many times accompanied him, and accounts describe Lincoln spending early mornings reading Shakespeare or military strategy before riding into the city.
Lincoln was carrying more weight than almost anyone in American history. Still, he understood that he needed genuine solitude to carry it well. Not more distraction. Not an escape into somebody else’s words. He experienced undivided time with his own mind. If a president managing a nation at war could see the need to step away and think, the rest of us juggling inboxes, notifications, and Teams messages might want to take the hint.
Carving Out Your Own Cottage
You don’t need 300 acres outside Washington to reclaim some solitude. You just need boundaries. This Labor Day and in the weeks after it try two things:
1. Batch your communication. Choose deliberate times during the workday to process email and messages. Between those windows, minimize the apps and turn off the notifications. Tell people to call you or knock on your door if something is truly urgent. Your inner circle and most important clients can trust that you’ll respond.
2. Protect real solitude, not just “alone time.” Take a walk without your phone. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and leave the phone inside. Let your mind wander somewhere it hasn’t been in a while. It may feel uncomfortable at first. That discomfort may be the clearest sign that we need it.
Labor Day is supposed to be a pause from labor. This year, let it also be a pause from constant input. You may discover, as Lincoln did at his cottage, that some of your clearest thinking and some of your best rest happens not when you’re most connected, but when you finally let yourself sit alone with your own mind.