Is it possible to take a vacation from work without actually taking the traditional vacation? What started as a simple way to teach myself, I don’t have to work all the time, so that someday I might actually take more than a day or two off work turned into some fun revelations and a new softer start to my days. Now, let me be clear. I’m not sharing anything about time management. This was more about releasing the pressure that I feel to be productive, even though I was thinking going into it, I’d be productive as hell. Enjoy the episode!
Resources
- Tool of the Week 👉 Better Proposals.
An online software that enables you to create attention-grabbing proposals with the help of an easy-to-use editor and a library of templates. - Recommended Podcast 👉 How to Get Unstuck: The Science and Soul of Releasing Emotional Loops with Katie Morton.
Katie shared a quote from the book, the Artist’s Way, that says “Perfectionism I always thought was seeking out the best in things but it was actually me looking for the worst.” Mind… blowing… right? - From Depleted to Restored: Which Type of Rest Do You Need Most? on the Small Business Casual with Emily Aborn
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 At some point last fall, I realized I needed a break.
Not necessarily a vacation, but a break from my calendar.
Being a business owner, I tend to allow myself to be available most of the time.
Maybe that’s not a characteristic of a business owner so much as a personal value perhaps.
In any case, I was seeing that time for myself for projects, for spontaneity becoming so minimal, it was difficult to schedule even coffee dates with friends.
So I tried something. I ended up calling it a Calendar Vacation.
Let me rewind just a little to tell you what my calendar looked like before I wiped everything out that week.
On paper, it didn’t look that bad. It was pretty strategically organized.
I feel like I kept most recurring client calls on Tuesdays through Thursdays.
I didn’t schedule a lot on Mondays or Fridays so I could keep them for client focus work and my business.
Basically, I grouped things where I could.
But when I really looked at it, a good chunk of my week lived in meetings.
Conversations that, of course, mattered, but didn’t always pertain directly to a productive outcome or revenue direction. And part of my aha’s following this experiment that I saw was that even when I wasn’t in a meeting, I was thinking about the next one.
They were always coming at me, something to prep for or running to the next one.
“If I could just reduce the number of meetings I’m in, I could get real focus time and make a dent in some of the projects that just seemed to keep getting pushed back and thus my feeling like I’m always behind.”
So when I looked at Thanksgiving week and realized how easy it would be to move things around, it felt like the perfect opportunity.
Quiet week, super simple. No meetings equals getting more shit done.
That’s how I went into this experiment.
So with all that in mind, let’s get into how it started.
The first rule was simple.
No meetings, none on my calendar that week. Not client calls, not even things for my own business that normally live on my calendar. Not even coffee dates with friends that I’d said I’d be more flexible that week and could meet. I told them we’d figure it out that day. Noth. Ing.
I remember feeling like I should put something on the calendar, even if it was Tasky projects, but nope, I didn’t let myself, I was still working ’cause I wasn’t on vacation.
I just didn’t schedule specific times for anything. Then from out of nowhere I decided not to set my alarm.
I wondered could I actually wake up at the same-ish time every day.
For years, I have lived by the alarm clock and I loathe that jolted wake up that happens. Yeah… I know there’s alarms that ease into louder sounds, etc, but that’s a story for another day.
So in my head, I kept thinking I’d probably wake up around five-ish.
And for the most part, that happened one morning, it was four. One morning, it was closer to five 30.
But most days I woke up right around five without even trying.
Probably because I’m pretty good about going to sleep around the same time every night. I have a wind down routine, so I fall asleep pretty fast.
I was so surprised that I was waking up without an alarm clock, yay me! It reminded me of something I used to think years ago that I had actually forgotten about that.
“Someday I’d love to get to a point where I didn’t need an alarm.”
I love early mornings. I just don’t love being jolted awake by a sound.
And now it feels like my mornings start much softer. There’s no urgency to be on. I wake up, grab my coffee or tea, read a bit, and ease into things. Some days I do a workout earlier, some days I don’t.
It varies. And this was the point to the calendar vacation…
…to remove the franticness and let me do whatever without being tied to the clock.
Now, this is where the story shifts a bit because what I expected to happen next didn’t quite play out that way going into the week.
I genuinely thought I was going to get a lot done.
I had this picture in my head of long stretches of focus time. That deep work that you always hear about. Finally sitting down with projects that had been sitting on the back burner. Projects that required larger chunks of time, clearing things off the list, making visible progress.
And to be clear, I did work. Things did move forward, but not in the way I envisioned.
As I was reviewing my calendar vacation week, I realized that I was expecting too much with very little direction or goal setting. I expected that because the time was open, things would just magically get done somehow.
I mean, I have enough paper notes and digital task lists. There’s no way I can’t not know what to do.
That said, I didn’t define what I wanted to finish or make progress on.
I didn’t decide what would make me look back on it and think, huh, that was a really great week. I didn’t create any kind of accountability for myself.
I assumed that fewer meetings would equal more productivity.
So after the week was over, I was thinking, “Ugh, I could have done so much more.”
Thinking about doing something is not the same as doing it, and apparently my brain likes to count intention as progress.
What surprised me the most was the depth. That I believe that if I’m not producing, I’m wasting time.
That assumption came into the week with me. I just didn’t notice it until I did.
What I also didn’t realize going into this week was how loud my brain had been. Not stressed exactly.
Just constantly on.
There was always something upcoming, something to prepare for, something pulling my attention slightly forward.
Even when I was trying to focus on right now without meetings on the calendar, that background noise that I hadn’t noticed quieted down.
I didn’t hear it as much. It turned out that that week wasn’t about getting more done. It was about giving my nervous system a break, and I didn’t know how much I needed that until I felt it.
I remember listening to an episode of Small Business Casual with Emily Aborn where she talked about desensitizing and how we don’t realize how overstimulated we are until we remove some of the inputs, and that was exactly it.
My brain wasn’t getting rest. Even when meetings are good meetings, they fragment attention. They pull you out of deep thought. They keep you in reaction mode. And for the first time in quite a while, I wasn’t reacting. I wasn’t switching context every hour. I wasn’t watching the clock. I wasn’t mentally pre-rehearsing the next conversation, I was just present.
And that calendar vacation helped me see that rest doesn’t always look like stopping work.
Sometimes it looks like removing the noise around the work.
That’s what the calendar vacation gave me. Since that week, I’ve not set my alarm once. Most mornings I’m still waking up around the same time without forcing it.
Most mornings, I’m still waking up around the same time without forcing it. If I wake up later than I want, I adjust my morning routine a little and don’t beat myself up about like missing dead lifts or half an hour of reading the calendar.
Vacation wasn’t a replacement for real time off, but it was a first step for me.
It gave me enough space to see I don’t need to be in meetings all the time to move things forward. And it also showed me where I do need more structure if I want focused work to actually happen.
I tried using AI to help me revisit my calendar in an effort to optimize, but that was not successful. I do wish I would’ve kept it so I can tell you what that looked like, but I deleted it.
I try to keep my convos clean so I don’t just have a massive running list over there. So I follow my gut and I group things together on my calendar.
The Takeaway
The question is, was the experiment a success?
Now that I’ve laid this all out for myself, technically yes it was, but not in the way I expected, but in a better way, a more long-term benefiting kind of way because I got so many ahas out of it, and it’s something I plan on keeping to do periodically.
If you’re listening to this and thinking your calendar feels a bit much, you don’t have to wipe a whole week to start.
You could try one or two meeting free days, but on days you usually have meetings.
You can’t take a shortcut and do it on the days you already don’t plan anything that’s cheating.
Do you think you’ll try a calendar vacation?
