I just finished a break where I traveled for four weeks to see family and friends in places I used to live (in NYC and New England). My intention was not to completely stop working, but that all of my projects would become much lower priority.

Here are some things that worked for me.

• Banking content: I didn’t want to have to write every day and podcast every week, but I did want to keep the publishing schedule going. To do that, I pre-recorded five podcasts before I left and wrote many blog posts. I still wrote quite a bit during the break and did have to edit and post the podcasts, but it was much less work than normal.
• Setting expectations: Before I left, I made a podcast about how I was taking a break and what my strategy was. I also set meeting expectations with my partners and clients.
• Having a generation strategy: To make it a lot easier to make five podcasts in a couple of days, I did a four part series about lessons I learned from Art & Fear.
• Lowering the bar: My goal in each podcast is to share something that is helping me in my writing with a clear takeaway. If I had that, I didn’t worry about the length.
• Shutting off sometimes: Part of my trip was meant to be a real vacation, and during that time, I completely shut off.
• Prioritizing relationships: I never turned down a chance to see my family or friends and made sure that my wife and I had plenty of time together as well. Everything else had to fit in between that.
• Having fewer obligations: I do more projects alone or in partnerships that are trying to build modest businesses that can withstand me being away from it. My client work is more advisory and easy to schedule.

As I spoke about in my podcast, I did this exact same trip in 2021 and it completely derailed me. I did not set expectations correctly with a client and had to do a lot more work than I wanted to. I had to pare back everything to just work I was obligated to do and then kept that pattern for more than a year until I could get control again.

This time, using the strategies above, I was able to have the break I wanted and also keep projects going enough so that I could easily pick them back up when I returned.