Are you as disciplined with your downtime as you are with your working hours?
How often do you take a complete break, with no work tasks creeping in?
In yesterday’s Thursday HotSeat, one of the topics we covered was the importance of setting clear dates and intentions for breaks and holidays ahead of time.
It is well known that taking time out is crucial to productivity levels as well as happiness. However, just like with business tasks or meetings, if downtime isn’t scheduled and given some attention to make it a reality, it is much more likely that it won’t happen in the way we intend, or perhaps not at all.
This article from Forbes entitled “Why Leaders Must Take Time Off: 6 Tips to Get Away”, covers the main reasons why Leaders can find it difficult or challenging to prioritise time away from work and how to overcome those.
In this day and age, I think we all theoretically know that taking care of our own health and happiness is important. However, in practicality it can still be easy to fall into the kind of thinking that says “the timing’s not good for a break right now, but once I’ve done x,y,z, then it will be better”, or perhaps “I am feeling quite good, I don’t need a break at the moment”.
Another perspective to offer on this however is, that if you are taking regular breaks, you won’t ever need one.
Simply taking time out to do the things you love, with the people you love, because you want to.
Apart from this being a strong move towards living a life by design, and not by default, it also supports you performing better at work, and being loved and appreciated even more at home.
