There is a soccer match on the television, but it has paused for a VAR check—a Video Assistant Referee is reviewing the footage to determine whether or not a foul should be a penalty. FIFA added VAR to the game in hopes of making judgement calls fairer. I’m not a fan of it. I think it unnecessarily drags the matches out with very little benefit.

But VAR is not the subject of this post.

Major League Baseball recently introduced a pitch clock. Pitchers have a limited amount of time to throw a pitch before the batter is awarded an automatic ball. Batters can’t waste time, either, without getting an automatic strike against them. MLB made this change this season and it worked. Games were faster and more exciting.

But the pitch clock is not the subject of this post.

What I’m thinking about is rule changes. When I was a kid, I thought that the laws of all games were immutable. Sure, you could have “house rules,” but then you weren’t really playing the game. You had to play by the book, and it never occurred to me to ask where the book came from.

Rules can and do change for all sorts of reasons. Usually, the intent is to make the game better. Fairer, in the case of VAR. More fun for fans, in the case of the MLB pitch clock. When I was in high school, I participated in Quiz Bowl, a kind of academic trivia contest. In my sophomore year, I discovered a way to exploit the rules for math questions, which my team was bad at, to give the opposing team less time to answer the question. I’m not going to explain the mechanics because I do not want to fall asleep right now. My point is that I recognized a weakness in the rules and took advantage of it. Other teams started doing it, too, which made math questions useless. At the end of the season, all the teams agreed to change the rule so that my exploit would no longer work. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t fun. We wanted to improve the game.

Our lives run on rules. Some are imposed upon us, like laws, codes of conduct, or restrictions and regulations at work. But we also impose rules on ourselves. We make rules about what we can and can’t do. Who we can do it with or not. When. Some rules are beneficial. Some aren’t. Some start out beneficial but outlive their usefulness and become needless burdens. Changing those rules might make life more enjoyable, but we forget that rules can be changed.

A rule I’ve been trying to change for myself is “I must be busy all the time.”

Note that I’m not talking about productivity. I’m talking about being occupied constantly. I kept myself so busy that I wouldn’t even let myself sit still long enough to get an accurate reading when I took my blood pressure. There was always something I should put away, something I should move, something I should clean.

The irony is that I was making myself so busy that I didn’t have time to think about whether the things I was doing were worth doing. I was busy, but what I was doing didn’t always matter.

I’m working on that. I’m telling myself that I don’t have to be busy all the time. It’s OK to take a minute, go outside, and watch birds for a few minutes. Take a breath. Touch grass. The rule that says I can’t? That rule needs to change.

FIFA and Major League Baseball changed the rules of their games, hoping to improve them. We can argue whether the rule changes were right, but the rules can be changed again if people decide they don’t work. Rules are not handed down from some mythic authority, unable to be challenged or changed.

What rule for your life do you need to change?