And I’m not talking about vacation or weekends. I’m talking about a more regular practice, built into our understanding of what work is. Fallow time is part of the work cycle, not outside of it. In periodic intervals around the completion of a project, I have lately given myself permission to watch “Deadwood: The Movie,” to nap over the newspaper, to take a walk and restore the white space for complex thinking and writing. It can feel indulgent. It can feel … lazy. But the difference between lazing around and laissez-faire is that I’m actually going about the business of my business.

In taking this pause in production in favor of absorption, I admit that I’m fighting my innate impatience. This is me working hard against my antlike tendencies, ingrained in me by my immigrant parents, modern-day hustle culture and our pervasive, status-quo American busyness. This is me pushing aside the overwhelming in order to think real thoughts.

In a recent post on LinkedIn that went viral, Ian Sohn, president of the digital advertising and marketing agency Wunderman Chicago, wrote in defense of his vision of a healthy and humanistic workplace: “I never need to know that you’re working from home today because you simply need the silence. I deeply resent how we’ve infantilized the workplace. How we feel we have to apologize for having lives. How constant connectivity/availability (or even the perception of it) has become a valued skill.”

Protecting and practicing fallow time is an act of resistance; it can make us feel out of step with what the prevailing culture tells us. The 24/7 hamster wheel of work, the constant accessibility and the impatient press of social media all hasten the anxiety over someone else’s judgment. If you aren’t visibly producing, you aren’t worthy. In this context, taking time to lie dormant feels greedy, even wasteful. And of course there are often financial concerns. (Apparently, Mr. Sohn isn’t going to fire you if you don’t produce something on a Thursday, but someone else might.)

The chatter of everyday life lets us know exactly what the expectations of a workday are and the value placed on how we spend it. We are told to do the work, and then to broadcast it. But this “always-on work culture” is, as the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told The Wall Street Journal, creating “broken” people. It’s a paralyzing and self-cannibalizing cycle.