Can I tell you something people find surprising?
I take a lot of time off.
Not a long weekend here and there. Real time. About four weeks in the middle of the year, and another four weeks over the Australian summer. Most years, that’s how it’s structured. Deliberately.
I work in twelve-week sprints. Then I stop.
People sometimes assume this means I’m not that busy, or that my business runs itself, or that I’ve found some trick the rest of us haven’t. None of that’s true. I built it this way on purpose, because I know how I actually function. My head, my body and my emotions don’t do well on a slow, constant burn. They do better with real stretches of effort, followed by real stretches of rest. Not a day off here and there to survive until the next thing. An actual decompression, often enough that I never get close to empty.
A lot of clients come to me wanting exactly this. Genuine rest. Time fully away from the business. And almost always, they arrive already exhausted by the idea of it, because in their head, getting there means an overhaul. A new operating system for the whole business. Every process rebuilt, every dependency on them removed, before they can responsibly disappear for four weeks.
So they don’t start. The plan is too big, so nothing happens.
Here’s what I’ve noticed, over and over. That’s not usually where change begins.
It begins somewhere much smaller. A four-day weekend. The Friday and the Monday, actually off. Team, clients and suppliers told in advance that you’re unreachable. The apps off your phone. Email off your phone. And something planned for those four days that you’d actually look forward to, not just a gap in the calendar.
That’s the whole first step. Not a restructure. One weekend.
It’s not always easy. Four days away can still feel like a risk the first time, even when nothing goes wrong. But it’s a very different kind of hard to trying to compress fifty-two weeks of hustle into forty-eight hours, so you can finally “earn” four weeks off later. One of those is a decision. The other is a debt you’re hoping to pay down eventually, which usually means never.
This is something that comes up often in the one-to-one work I do. Someone arrives circling a big decision, expecting we’ll need to unpack the whole business to get anywhere. And sometimes we do. But just as often, what actually shifts things is smaller and clearer than either of us expected. Not a twelve-step plan. One decision, seen properly, that quietly does the work of ten.
You may be noticing a pattern here.
In the blog I wrote last week, When Adding More Makes It Heavier, I talked about how we tend to reach for something bigger, something that makes us feel productive. That’s often a symptom of our own perceived scarcity.
The same principle applies here.
When we reach for the whole restructure instead of the next natural step, or the whole four weeks away instead of one four-day weekend, we’re fuelling the same scarcity problem.
When was the last time you took genuine time away from your work? Not checking in. Not the payroll review. Genuinely not available.