You can rot if you want to, you can leave your rot behind.

On redefining rest during 'Rot Week'.

Dec 31, 2025

New York Times’ Wirecutter sent an email wishing me a ‘Happy Rot Week’ to promote their roundup of ‘10 excellent sofas’. I realized while reading it that I’ve barely touched my sofa this week. Instead, I’ve been doing some deep cleaning, writing, keeping up with half marathon training1, connecting with friends (both in person and afar) and overall catching up on ‘life admin’ — I’m getting a much-needed haircut on Friday, and an eye exam that needs to be scheduled stat.

And despite that, I feel rested. But in an online world where I am inundated with images of people becoming one with their sofas, eating and drinking to oblivion, and wearing the same sweatsuit for 4 days, I can’t help but wonder if I am resting wrong. Should I be rotting instead? Is my desire for productivity, or am I just redefining what rest looks like for me?

The week between Christmas and New Year’s has become known as a week with no rules, a week for ‘rotting’ on the couch, and a week to lose all sense of space and time, after all. And while the idea of deep rest sounds incredibly appealing, I actually think I like knowing what day it is, I like taking a shower, I like the idea of a more nuanced pause.

I have a long history with working over the holidays. When I was in college and I’d come back to New York between semesters, I always found a job to help spend my time. One year, I babysat for a famous fashion designer and his family on the Upper East Side. When their usual nanny couldn’t go to Miami with them, they brought me. We flew private, but I was with toddlers for about 12 hours a day.

Another year, I worked at the holiday markets in Columbus Circle and Bryant Park, selling triptych photographs of NYC’s bridges or random flowers. They weren’t my taste, but I sold a lot and worked an hourly rate plus commission. I became chatty with the booths next to and around me.

After that, I was either in retail or on customer-facing teams, always working through the holidays and in that sacred time between Christmas and New Year’s. No rest, no rot.

In my time at two D2C e-commerce darlings, there was no concept of a holiday in the e-commerce world — I was managing customer support teams, and we spent the 26th gearing up for a slew of sizing questions, exchange requests for when a partner or parent inevitably bought something in Sand when they wanted it in Cloud, and the dreaded, but inevitable, “you ruined Christmas, my package is lost” emails.

My last year working for one of these companies, I worked every single day, weekends included, between Black Friday and January 5^th. That’s a long time.

But working holidays was the reality for me, and I didn’t even consider a world where I could (or would) stop doing so.

In December 2020, I had transitioned to working a proper tech job, at a company with a holiday code freeze. In my new role, I didn’t work with teams who interacted with customers, and so I was given the time between Christmas and New Year’s completely off for the first time in my working life.

It was after that holiday, when I finally got a taste of how the other half lived, that I made a promise to myself: I’d never work that week again.

Being the first holiday season of the pandemic, there was a lot of rotting. I don’t remember much, but I know we stayed home and spent a lot of time on the couch. The days blended into each other, and I relished in my rest (or rot).

I’m happy to report that since then, I’ve been able to keep this promise to myself.

The first three years, for one reason or another, I did relish in the rot. 2020 and 2021 being the height of the pandemic, so rotting was natural. Then the next year, I was pregnant and tired, so rotting became my default.

In 2023, things started to shift a bit. I had a five-month-old, and had been back at work for a month already — too much, too soon, but that’s a story for another day.

I was also mourning the death of my grandmother, who passed away the morning of Christmas Eve. I didn’t want to do anything. I canceled the New Year’s party we had planned at the house. The haze hit harder, and the rot started to take a dark turn — becoming one with the couch no longer was an act of joyful rest.

Sometime after Christmas that year but before New Year’s, I bundled my then five-month-old into his stroller and forced myself to go on a walk in our neighborhood. I didn’t realize how much I needed fresh air, movement, and a shower until the cold air — and then my sadness — made my eyes water.

After that, I vowed to take a walk every day until I went back to work. A simple act of self-care and a moment of anti-rot.

My grandmother passing has (and will) forever change the way the holidays feel. She had a love of Christmas, and the irony of her passing on the 24th of December feels too cruel, even for this cruel world. Rotting during ‘Rot Week’ no longer serves me, at least for the time being.

Last year, my parents took my son for a few days between the two holidays. What a gift!

Armed with the knowledge of how crappy rotting felt the year prior and ample free time that I didn’t need to spend parenting, I over-indexed into a different mode. I declared it my week of Getting Shit Done™.

I made a plan to clean every corner of the apartment, armed with a room-by-room to-do list and day-by-day plan2. I got a haircut, I went on walks, and I napped. I wrote. I meticulously planned these days so nothing would be lost.

I wanted to avoid the rot altogether.

This year, I’m taking a different approach — though I didn’t really plan it that way.

The days immediately following Christmas were spent mostly at home, with my husband and son. Playing in the snow, hanging out in PJs, cleaning up Magnatiles six times a day, slowly cleaning the house, running in between naps, eating food my husband has cooked.

And again, my parents have my son again for a few days.

At first, I thought I was going to do it all, just like that. I drafted the list of what needs cleaning, started to time box those tasks, and started working through the other things that need doing (the aforementioned haircut, runs, and eye exam).

Then, the first day hit. We made it back home after dropping off our kid, I started a load of laundry, did a workout, and then fell asleep.

I woke up from my nap in a stupor, not knowing how much time had passed or where it all went. I tackled the dishes in the dishwasher, ran another load, and decided I was done for the day. I laid in bed, watched a few episodes of my current show (Six Feet Under), and went out to dinner with my husband.

My time-boxed plan had already been thrown out the window, but as I tallied everything I did I still felt proud. And I knew there was always tomorrow. “Tomorrow” was the first full day, after all.

Tomorrow came. I woke up slowly, reading my book and cuddling a cat on the couch. I emptied some trash bins around the house, I cleaned out the fridge, I folded the laundry from the day prior, I went on my run. I wrote a draft of what you’re reading now3.

A warm up compared to the day I had planned, but again — I was done. I watched more Six Feet Under, read more of my book, and my husband and I went out to dinner again.

Last year, I remember feeling disappointed when I didn’t get a chance to clean out the big scary closet. I had done so much, and yet I was focused on the thing I didn’t have enough time to do.

This year, so far, these feelings haven’t come up at all. Every decision to not declutter one space is a decision to do something else for myself — it’s another chapter read, another mile run, another hour napped, another episode watched.

There is something about being an adult with a job, responsibilities, and minimal time to myself that really makes these moments not only necessary, but also incredibly joyful and rewarding. Rewarding not because I’m checking things off the list, but because I’m allowing myself to follow my own momentum and see how the days unfold.

The idea of just sitting on the couch as I used to doesn’t sound relaxing in totality, but this year I realize I do want those moments to exist, I just don’t want them to take over.

I was texting with a friend who said “vacation time is my time for doing chores and not being stressed about them,” which perfectly puts how I’m feeling into the words I couldn’t quite find.

This week is about finding the space to figure out what I want to do. I am armed with a ‘could-do’ list instead of a ‘to-do’ list, and each day is about finding the right balance of execution and stillness.

On the outside, my week probably doesn’t look like rest. But to me, the luxury of waking up at 9am, of just being responsible for myself, for being able to throw on an album while I clean out the fridge or break down boxes is in fact a form of relaxation. But so is balancing it with a slow morning spent reading, or writing at a cafe, or getting outside to run four miles in 31º F4 weather that “feels like” 17º5.

It’s taken me a long time to view taking care of my home as an act of self-care, and now that this is true for me, it feels there is no going back.

Being able to choose when I fold the laundry vs cramming it in between naps is completely different, at least for my psyche.

One is an act out of obligation and feeling time-poor. The other is something I’m choosing to do because I feel time-rich. It’s a completely different impact on my nervous system.

Choosing not to do something because I know it doesn’t have to be done just because I have free time is a gift too. If I don’t clean out the closet I have my eye on this week because I decided to do something else instead, that’s okay. It can get done another time. I don’t need to fill every moment of this week just because I can.

To me, that’s the winning formula. That is joy. That is rest. That is restorative.

I am pretty good at tending to myself, but it always feels like it is on someone else’s time — a run after daycare drop off but before work, a load of dishes done after we’ve eaten and my kid is in bed, having to make a decision every Sunday as to whether I want to use nap time to fold laundry or write.

This week is about embracing those things I do anyway, but truly doing them on my time, in the most joyful and relaxed way I can. While the internet sometimes makes me feel like I should be rotting into the couch (I’m looking at you, Wirecutter), I’ve realized for me rest is more about the absence of urgency rather than an absence of effort.