How I Took A Month Off Work

First published on September 3, 2021

The very observant among you may have noticed that I haven't written for a while. (Although because social media algorithms are unpredictable, you may not quite have noticed that - a reason to sign up to my mailing list to make sure you get a digest every month or two of all the articles I post.) This practice, which I began almost exactly five years ago, has been to post a piece, written in 12 minutes and proof-read once, every week. Except when I'm on holiday. And I've just returned from the longest break from work I've had since 2013.

I took five weeks off work over August, and I had an intuition during that break that I wanted to write a piece exploring how and why that happened. Because it's unusual. My wife is on maternity leave right now, and she thinks this is the first time since she left university aged 22 that she has had more than three weeks off work. I have only had one longer break than the one I've just returned from since I left university, a six-month career break in 2013.

Here, as best I can explore in the next few minutes, is how it happened.

We owe a lot to the people around us. As I've written before, it really pays to have three groups of people around you when you are learning or growing in any way, including growing a business, changing career and thinking about how to live the life you really want to live. One of those groups is people ahead of you on the journey, and the seed of taking August off was when I heard my former coach, Rich Litvin, saying that he takes December and August off every year.

When I first heard Rich say that, it felt like an impossible idea, but one of the things I learned from working with Rich is that far more is possible than I thought, that I can create my life far more than I think. And that really, you can just make up life a lot more than you expect.

Wrapped in that word, 'impossible', were aspects of my mindset around scarcity and around money. These things, and the undoubted drag of the status quo, of what everyone does, meant that I didn't immediately book August off. What it took instead was a global pandemic.

Late last June, I realised that I was exhausted. Our holiday to Australia had been cancelled, none of the long weekends we normally take off had happened. I essentially hadn't had a day off since the UK's first lockdown in March. I was reflecting on my Warren Buffett-inspired list of 25 things that I wanted to achieve in the year and near the bottom of that list was (as had been the previous year, I think) 'take August off'. And I suddenly thought, maybe I should do that. (As an aside, this is one of the things that arguably meant that I didn't complete my goals for the year - beware great ideas!)

So it only took a global pandemic to get me to try something as seemingly impossible in the world of a normal adult as taking off a month in the summer. As it turned out, I didn't quite take August off in 2020. I had made promises and commitments to clients which I didn't want to break, and so I took some of August off, but mostly worked Tuesdays and a little more than that here and there. But the seed was sown and the sense of 'what always happens' (work five days a week, take about 25 days of holiday a year - that's in the UK, anyway) was broken.

Then this year... well, the decision was a lot easier. The way I have changed my life, really, has been a series of stacked decisions - when a decision, like writing a piece like this once a week - turns out to be good, stick with it, and build the next piece on top of that. And that's what this felt like: ok, this year, let's take the whole of August off. That decision was inspired by having a daughter, too, yes, but also, again, by the pandemic. Leah hadn't spent much time with her grandparents because of coronavirus, and we had hardly been out of the city. And so maybe it needed two years of pandemic to get me into the space to fully switch off.

And now, returning refreshed, I am pretty sure I will never work 12 months a year again. That, I suspect, is now a part of who I am.

The final decisions on things like this - including taking August off this year - are often cemented, in moments when I'm worrying about whether it's the right thing to do, by a question I always try to ask myself as a self-employed person: if I'm not able to be more free and choice-ful with my time when I work for myself, what's the point? That's my way of reminding myself that the only reason I don't do things is me.

That goes for the other reasons that held me back - a sense of scarcity and my stories about money. That only if I worked as much time as possible could I have the money I needed. That may have been more true before, but I have certainly sacrificed the chance to earn more by taking a month off.

But that, in the long term, isn't the point. Because that's not what real success is for me. What matters, deep down, are our relationships and our experiences. Our impact on the world, too, yes: that's why I will almost certainly always work some of the time. But we need to feel alive, and a month with family and friends, with nature, with love. That makes me feel alive.

And when the only thing stopping me doing that, really, deep down, is me, why wouldn't I do it?