Several years ago, I met a consultant who plans his year in a most unusual way. He takes off from work one day per week, one week per month, and one week per year. "Why," I asked him, "do you do this." He replied that he needs these breaks to invest in his own personal development and renewal so that when he does work, he is 100% present for his clients. In short, it's not just about vacation. It's about making the biggest contribution he can to the world.
This is consistent with the latest research on maintaining superior performance. Recovery is essential.
But for me, it raises an additional question: how might we design our time over the course of a year if we were not be bound by typical job constraints (read: self-employed), did a bit of imagining, and set aside normal assumptions about schedule--after all, the Monday through Friday work week is a human construction, not a law of nature, and many other western countries take way more vacation than we do in the U.S. What if we had a way to generate reliable revenue to allow this? Indeed, what if creative calendaring actually proved useful to increasing revenue?
Yeah, you gotta be in a pretty good mood to ask such questions. I am. Plus I've had my best year of income ever (by far), so the financial anxiety I've felt since 2001 has subsided, at least for the time being. This leaves me open to questions I wouldn't otherwise ask. Here are a few others:
- How to design the calendar for a year so that we spend a lot of time with our families? Sure, there are holiday weekends and occasional week-long trips. But how about something more substantial like having parents or siblings spend a month living with us--or us living a month with them, perhaps while doing virtual work or projects where they live? The closest example of the latter: I've had the great fortune to see my brother, Alex, 8-10 times over the past year to do client work in Austin. The visits are only 2-3 days in length, but their frequency has allowed me to see him more often than I have since he was five years old and living in Ann Arbor.
- What if we made an agreement with certain close friends and/or family members to live together in the same place--and then explored how to make this work?
- Wouldn't it be nice to periodically take 3-month mini-retirements to live in a different part of the world, explore new skills, or learn a new language? Why save retirement for when we have less physical capacity (even with the best fitness/nutrition programs, things do atrophy), are more likely to have health constraints, and may be impeded by high fuel/airfare costs due to the pending end of cheap oil (if you doubt the latter, check out what the leading oil geologists and economists are saying)?
Think big. Then make it practical. That seems to be a good approach to such questions.
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