For years I've run Mobius Poker without a scheduled day off. I had almost no rules around when I allowed myself to work. If there was something useful to do, I did it. If there wasn't, I found something. I told myself this was discipline.
I recently ran the numbers on what seven days a week was actually buying me, and the answer made me feel a little stupid.
If you work six days a week and add a seventh, the maximum increase in output is 17%. In a perfectly linear world, where every day is equally productive and rest has no effect on quality, a project that would take 52 weeks at a six-day pace finishes only about seven weeks earlier at a seven-day pace.
Your seventh day is almost never as good as your third or fourth. It is usually your worst day. You are more tired, less patient, and more likely to confuse hours with progress. So the real gain is lower than 17%. In poker, it can easily turn negative.
In most jobs, a low-quality day means less gets done. You still move forward, just more slowly. In poker, a low-quality day can mean you move backward. You miss thin value. You rationalize bad folds. You slide into autopilot. Most players, if they are honest, play their C-game on that extra day and call it work ethic.
Compounding works both ways. Momentum from an extra day can carry forward, but so can fatigue from a missing one. In practice, fatigue is the side most people undercount. It bleeds into the other six days. Your attention gets a little shorter each day. Your review gets shallower. You start missing the small things that separate strong play from mediocre play.
That hidden tax can dwarf whatever the extra day earns. Say you play 10,000 hands across the other six days. If the missing rest day costs you even 1 bb/100 over that volume, you have given up 100 big blinds before your seventh day has earned a single one back.
Poker players already think this way about game selection. If a game is bad, you leave. If the lineup is tough and your edge is thin, you sit out. A rest day is the same decision applied to your calendar. You are looking at the weakest day on your schedule, recognizing that the edge is thin or nonexistent, and choosing not to play it.
Sometimes the same logic points the other way. If the games are unusually soft, that might be the week to play seven days. But that should be a deliberate choice with a clear reason. Without a default rest day, there is always a reason to sit down. Flexibility turns into permission to work all the time.
This logic scales across any schedule. Going from five days to six adds at most 20%. Going from six to seven adds at most 17%. Each extra day is a worse deal than the one before it. The question is simple: is your last day producing enough value to justify the fatigue it creates and the quality it sacrifices?
The life side of the trade matters too. If you work seven days a week and drop to six, you are going from zero days off to one. That is 52 days a year you did not have before. Nearly two months of life. If you already take one day off and move from six working days to five, you double your time off.
You can spend those days recovering, thinking, studying with a clear head, socializing, or doing absolutely nothing. All of that has value. Some of it will even make you better at poker.
I still feel the pull to open the laptop because working feels virtuous in the moment, and I have not figured out the right number yet. Maybe it is six days. Maybe it is five.
But when I look back at all those seven-day weeks, I keep coming back to the same thought: I would probably be in almost the same place if I had taken one day off every week. The business would still be here. The students would still be improving. I just would have a few hundred more days of rest and recovery behind me. That extra day always felt important in the moment. Looking at the math now, it feels much smaller. A fight over a few percentage points at best. I am looking forward to keeping that time for myself and discovering how little I actually gave up.