Hey Reader,

Last weekend my wife and I checked off a bucket list trip. We went out to the Gorge in Washington and watched our favorite band, the Dave Matthews Band, play three nights in a row. It was the first time in a long time I'd taken three fully disconnected days.

I know it's not good. I tell leaders to take deep time away, and for a couple of years I'd been telling myself it just wasn't the season for it. When you love what you do, you can spend almost every waking minute thinking about it, and I have been. Nobody kept me from taking three days off. I just never put them on the calendar, and treated it as intentional disconnection.

What made this one different is that I treated it like any other block on my calendar.

Two weeks ago on the podcast I talked about outcome blocking, the sixty seconds before any block where you decide what done looks like. Interestingly enough, I've never once pointed that at time off. So before we left, I did. The outcome I wanted was deep restoration, to fully recharge the mind and spirit. The goal underneath it was to disconnect and relax with my bride. It wasn't about having a plan for the weekend, not "enjoy the shows." My outcome was about how I wanted to feel on the way home.

Halfway through the weekend I checked in on it. Was I disconnected, or was I running the business in my head? I have found that outcome blocking only works if you set the goal first. You can't check in on something you never named out loud and set as an expectation. For me, I was fully disconnected, and completely present.

The people who study recovery have a term for what I hadn't been doing. They call it psychological detachment, and the part of that research that stayed with me is that the people most wrapped up in their work are the ones worst at it. I'm not making an excuse. It's just been the default, and the whole point of a calendar block is to beat the default through intentional thought and planning.

You'd never walk into an important meeting without knowing what it's for. But you'll take a day off with nothing attached to it, spend it half present, and come back tired. I have done this for years. Taking the time was never the problem. The missing definition of a desired outcome was.

As we are coming into the busy fall season, I'm thinking about three things.

Schedule the time.

Take the time.

Allow yourself the time.

The third one is the one I'd been skipping, and it's the one an outcome fixes. Name what you want to be true when the time is over, keep it loose, and check in on it halfway through.

Try this today: pick your next full day off and put it on the calendar this week. Under it, write one line about what you want to be true when it's over. Then hit reply and tell me the date. Saying it out loud to someone else is half of keeping it.

dusty

P.S. The research says the benefit fades once you're back, so I didn't wait. I've already planned and put my next block on the calendar. How about yours?