Jay Papasan:
I spent the past weekend at a Montana retreat called The Refuge. It’s a place whose mission is to keep busy leaders from burnout. And I was with a baker’s dozen of leaders, people leading companies from over a hundred million in revenue to people just leading a team of volunteers in a nonprofit or a congregation. But the one thing everybody had in common is that they were always moving fast and never taking time to slow down.
And my friend Daniel Tardy said something that really stuck with me. He asked the weirdest question. He goes, “How often do you change your tires?” And one of the guys said, “I don’t know. Every 40,000 or 50,000 miles.” And he goes, “That’s right. That’s what they recommend for most cars. But how often does a NASCAR driver change their tires? How often does an F1 driver change their tires?” He goes, “You guys are leaders. You’re not just driving to the grocery store. You’re on the track every day. And if you drive on worn tires, what happens?” That’s when accidents happen. That’s when we put ourselves at risk.
And here’s the irony, ’cause we’re talking about rest, folks. We’re talking about recharging the battery, changing the metaphorical tires, so that we can get back on the track and get back on the race and hopefully win it. But the irony is, the people who need it the most are the least likely to take it.
A 2023 Pew Research study showed that over half of all leaders don’t take all of their vacation, and just under half of regular employees don’t take their vacation. So, the people who are supporting everyone else actually take the least. That’s what this episode’s about. It’s about putting your vacation on your calendar first. We call it putting a boulder in the stream so that the work will flow around it.
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
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Jay Papasan:
So, we’re revisiting a principle that we covered in The ONE Thing. In the section on time blocking, we talk about the three things that absolutely have to be on your calendar. Of course, one is the one thing, but that’s not the first thing we put on our calendar. We also need to plan our work, our planning time. That’s when we look at our goals and our 411 and see if our calendar actually matches it. I’ve talked about this dozens of times on this podcast, right? Taking your goals for a date, looking to see if your calendar reflects your goals. Well, that’s not number one either. What’s the first thing that goes on a calendar? Your time off. Because if you’re going to do extraordinary things, you need to have a moment to rest and recharge, or you’re gonna run out of steam.
Entrepreneurship, leadership in any form, parenthood, right, taking care of other people, whether you’re a teacher, a pastor, a parent, a son or daughter taking care of older parents, you’re having to lead for others, and it can be exhausting. And if we don’t make that space purposefully, we can look up, and we don’t have any time, and we don’t have any energy left. Energy left to do the things that we were born for, to serve others, to fulfill our mission.
I remember a conversation I had with Gary Keller back when we were writing a book every year to two years. We were in our most productive season. Every year, around October or November, he would photocopy his month-at-a-glance calendar, and he would share it with the executives and leaders that he spent the most time with. And we would see a full year time blocked around his twenty percent. And so the goal was if he was blocking the time, I would try to mirror my calendar to his. That all made sense, and I loved, like as early as October, November, getting a preview of the most important work I would do the next year and getting to plan my vacation around it as well.
The thing that struck me, for someone running a huge company like he was, every two months, he had either a week or two weeks of vacation blocked. And I remember sitting down with him for the first meeting of the year, and I’m looking at the calendar, and I’m telling him, “Here’s where I’m going. Here would be the conflicts that I have. I think I can work around it. I see that you’re going on a two-week vacation in April, maybe, or May.” I said, “Where are you going?” And he looked at me with a smile and just said, “I don’t know, but I know I’m gonna need it.”
And that hit me like a hammer, and it led to many discussions with my wife and my team over the years that the first thing we instruct them to put on the calendar, whether they’re a ONE Thing student, a coaching client, an employee, or just someone we care about, is vacation time. And it acts like a boulder in the stream. If you put a boulder in the stream, what flows around it? Even the swiftest currents will go around it. That’s the work. If you plan out that vacation, then in the weeks that go up to it, you can be doing the pre-work to make sure that you’re free. You can say, “Hey, I’m sorry, I’m gonna be out then. Can we meet before, or can we push that to after?” Or “Do I need to set up a proxy, someone on my team that can cover for me while I’m gone?” It allows us to plan to actually be checked out, and that gives us a fighting chance.
Otherwise, what happens is the water just kind of floods straight through, right into that vacation time. And you’ve been there. It’s not just that you’re waiting in line to check into the plane or get to the hotel or waiting to get your chair set up on the beach, and you’re on your phone and knocking out some Slacks and emails. You’re doing it all through the vacation. You’re not present with your family, you’re not present with yourself, and that means you’re not fully rested. It’s like having too many tabs open in your browser. There’s just this constant consciousness of the thing that you’re not attending to, creating a little bit of anxiety and stealing some of the fun, and what’s more important, the rest and relaxation.
So, when I say boulders in the stream, what we’re talking about is being purposeful about taking breaks. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned and come close to experiencing more than once, is if we aren’t intentional about taking breaks, we will get an unscheduled break, and it’s called a breakdown. And I see it all the time, the people who show up at our door.
I still remember doing a discovery call with a potential coaching client, and they had not had a single vacation day in over six years. This is not crazy talk. If you’re still going, like, if you’re going, “Who does that?” A lot of business owners do. They get into the business, they feel like everything rides on their shoulders, they feel like they can never get a break, and they build it up so fast that it all depends on them, and then they’re trapped. They’re trapped in this very thing that they built to escape all of the pressure and the have-tos has become the biggest have-to in their life. And I don’t want that to be you.
So, I’m gonna walk through some of the reasons we don’t and some of the ways we can put a boulder in the stream, so that you can time block that precious time off, and hopefully you can find that you will get a lot more done around it.
If you remember my episode with Cyril, he’s the guy who wrote Less Achieve More, we talked about an amazing study that talked about how work falls off in any given week around fifty to fifty-five hours. If you’re working beyond that, the quality of your work is dropping off, as is your productivity. You’re throwing more and more time to get a tiny fraction done. We’d just be better off checking out, going home, unplugging, watching your favorite show on Netflix or reading a book or just hanging out with the family in the backyard and coming back the next day and getting after it.
So, in a microcosm, it’s about taking time off on a daily basis. But in the bigger pattern is, when was the last time you truly unplugged? When was the last time that you really gave yourself permission to leave the business behind and go be present with yourself? It is an amazing adventure. It can be a little scary if you haven’t done it in a long time, but the feeling you get on the other side, I hope will become addictive for you because not only do you feel refreshed, but that space is where all the amazing ideas show up.
Your team may come to dread you coming back from vacation because you’ve got the next big thing ready to go. It wouldn’t have shown up without that space. That empty space is where those beautiful, crazy ideas find us, they take root, and we have time to think them through so that we can actually take action on them and get the next thing done.
So, let’s put a boulder in the stream. It’s fundamental, just a few paragraphs in The ONE Thing, but it might be some of the most important paragraphs you would ever read. If you don’t take time off, if you don’t take regularly scheduled breaks, you will get an unscheduled one, and that’s what we want to avoid.
So, if you don’t believe me, I’m just going to read off some actual research here. So, I said that there was this PEW research, and this is from 2023. So, this is post-COVID. This is totally relevant for all of us. The conclusion was managers were more likely than non-managers to leave time off unused. So, they had three weeks of vacation or four weeks, but they only took a few days of it, right? And as a business owner, we may not even allot ourselves time off. But if we don’t take it, not only are we not getting the benefit of time off, we’re setting a horrible example for our people, and we’re leading them to burn out right behind us.
There was another one that was put out by OnDeck via Score in 2019. It said only fifteen percent of small business owners fully disconnect on vacation. The flip side of that is eighty-five percent, almost nine out of ten, do not disconnect on vacation. So, even though they’re taking time off, they’re not really off. They’re in that nether world in between. Sixty-seven percent check in every single day. They just assume that it’s all going to burn down without them, and they may have built it that way.
And the last one I’ll share is, this comes from Wilbur Labs, and it was published in Entrepreneur this year in 2026. Ninety percent of startup founders say they’ve had stress or burnout bad enough to consider quitting. So, here you are trying to change the world, but you’re doing it in a way, you’re taking an approach that is likely undercutting your very effectiveness in trying to fulfill your dreams. If we don’t take those pauses, if we don’t unplug, we are risking not just our health and our relationships, we’re risking the very thing we’re trying to achieve.
There’s a great quote from Annie Lamott, and I remember it because it was actually in a writing book, but she said, “Everything works better if you just switch it off and then turn it back on.” It’s the old IT thing, right? “My computer’s acting up.” Did you turn it off?” And you’re like, “Oh, darn, I need to do that.” It’s true. It’s a reset. It just resets everything. It freezes up, and we all work better when we occasionally actually switch off.
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Jay Papasan:
So, I want to revisit Daniel Tardy’s idea of, kind of, resting like a race team. Daniel Tardy, if you recognize that name, he started EntreLeadership and built that brand from the ground up and was the host of that podcast for many years. So, all he did was talk to leaders, and that’s what he does today, is he coaches and leads them as well.
So, I loved his metaphor of how race car drivers have to change their tires, and it’s reality that most of us are running around, driving around at high speeds on threadbare tires, and we’re at risk constantly of getting a blowout. I dove into this, and there’s a race called the Qatar Grand Prix, and in 2023, the racing teams were pushing it so far, they actually had to establish a rule that they could not go more than 18 laps without changing their tires. And it was so that people didn’t make it a strategic advantage to try to skip it. Why? Because actual lives are at risk. Not just the drivers, but the people that are in the stands, right? If a car goes wildly out of control, it could impact many lives, and it’s incredibly dangerous. So, they actually capped it at 18 laps in an effort just to make the race safe.
So, what are your constraints? How long will you go without taking a break? I can tell you what most leaders do by default. They will only go on vacation when there is a clear and obvious universal reason to do so. Thanksgiving, maybe it’s your Christmas or Hanukkah celebrations when all of your family is off, and you would look really bad not doing so.
I still know some leaders who are only half checked out during those seasons. What they don’t do is take a Friday off every now and then, schedule a two-week vacation that’s not around work. So, they always play with it. “Oh, I’m gonna be in New York City for work. I’ll just take an extra day.” And what they end up doing is taking the extra day to sleep in bed, to kind of bed rot because they’re so exhausted, and then when they get up, they just open up their laptop and work from a hotel bed instead of their home.
A lot of them also regularly, on a schedule, they’ll talk about, “Oh, yeah, every year I get the flu,” or, “I get a bad sinus infection, and it’ll just put me down on my back for this many days.” Think about it. When you get to the place where your body is literally giving in to illness, it is literally giving in to exhaustion, not only are you useless, right? You are effectively bedridden. You also didn’t schedule it. It’s not gonna happen at a convenient time. Our body sometimes knows that you get past that big event, and it’s like, “Finally, I can just get this out of my system,” and you’ll get sick immediately after. You see it when people are just getting to the other side of a wedding or a honeymoon or a big push at the office. There’s all of these people who call in sick.
What would it look like instead of that happening at random, that you actually got to plan it? So this is not the challenge of the podcast, but here would be my challenge to you. If you were to hit pause on this episode and open up your calendar and look at the next twelve months, how much planned vacation do you actually have? Would it add up to a week? Would it add up to two? Think about most veteran employees that have been in a business for a long time are going to get a minimum of four to eight weeks, right? That’s what it looks like to work at a place for a long time.
And chances are, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re the owner of that business. How much time do you actually have blocked on your calendar today so that you can, “Change those tires, recharge the batteries, and get back out there”? Let’s just be a little bit more methodical. We will slow down to speed up. I promise you, there is no one out there that if they took two to three extra weeks off a year is really going to be slowed down over the long period of time it takes to build something extraordinary. You’re not going to build the whole thing this month or this year. We’re trying to have a great career, and over the course of a great career, we’re going to periodically need to take pit stops, change those tires, and get back out on the track. And if we manage it, just like a race team, we can win the race and be happy at the finish line.
So, how do you actually do it? I’ll share how Wendy and I have approached it, how I’ve learned from my mentors to do it. Before the end of the year, we’ll usually get together. And in preparation for that, we’ll have gotten the kids’ school calendars. We’ll look up all of the big events that we know are happening. Is someone getting married? Is there a big birthday, like your parents are turning 80, and you know that you’ll have to go home for that? Are there the normal holidays, whether it’d be Thanksgiving or religious or just a Fourth of July celebration that you want to celebrate at the lake instead of your backyard? And we look at those dates, and we come up with a shortlist.
Maybe we also create what is the business travel that I already know I have to do. Does your company have an annual event or two that you know you need to plan around? Do you have spring breaks and summer breaks that are logical places that you could plan for vacations and know that they would stick? Those are the dates we bring to the table, and then we often will create our dream list.
That’s one of my favorite things is where are all the places that we hope to go. We have a bucket list that goes out almost 15 years, folks. We went comprehensively through all of the places that we hope to visit before we die, and then we put them in five-year blocks based on how old we’d be and how willing we’d be to tough it in a place like Antarctica versus going to the French Riviera. I can go on a cruise when I’m 80. I probably can’t go backpacking in Patagonia when I’m 80. Maybe. I hope so, but I’m not going to make that bet.
So, we prioritize the trips that we can do while we’re thinking we’ll be our most mobile and most able and most willing to be uncomfortable, and then we’ll prioritize those trips that can happen when maybe I’ve got a walker or my knee’s not really working as well as it used to, and I don’t really want to face a long flight of stairs and going to Rome and looking at the Spanish Steps or going to Hawaii and climbing that long chain of steps up the mountain. Whatever it might be, we just think through it a little bit, and it gets exciting.
And now, we ask the question, based on our age and based on the age of our children, what would be the best couple of trips we could take this year? What would be the amazing experiences we can enjoy? Because I can tell you, those are the things when you scroll through your photos at the end of the year that put a smile on your face.
Earlier this year, I shared it, I went on a two-week trip to Japan. It was a place that we had on our docket. It was something we wanted to do, but a friend, Todd, reached out, said he was planning a hiking trip for a few authors, and I just said yes before I even knew where we were going. And then, it turned out to be Japan, and then I went and backpacked in the mountains of Japan for about six days with some amazing human beings. And then, Wendy met me, and we spent another week exploring Japan. And that was planned, but it was also by accident because we have a system for letting these things happen. All we had to do was make space and then take advantage of it.
And I can tell you, by the end of that two weeks, that is usually where I get antsy. I am so rested, so refreshed. I’m “Okay, enough of this rest stuff. I’m ready to get back in the race.” If you’ve ever seen a race car driver while there’s an error in the pit crew, like one of the wheels doesn’t come on, you can see them visibly getting angry. “Wait, I gotta get back on the track. I’m losing my place.” That’s me about two weeks into it. Maybe as I get older and I’m more open to not being in the race as often, maybe that’ll go to three weeks or four weeks. We’ll find out. But everybody can be gone for at least four or five days, if not a full week.
But look at your calendar. Plan, especially if you have kids, to truly unplug, to re-energize and go. So, that’s the annual.
You’ve heard me talk about permission to pause. It was Jen Davis that first gave me that idea. You can also just start where you are. Can you just take a half day every other week? Call it planning time and get out of your office. Maybe look up and at least maybe once a month, take a Friday off, right? And have a three-day weekend and actually try to enjoy it, right? And refresh yourself. Once a quarter, can you take a long weekend, maybe two, and then at least one week to two-week vacation per year.
But if you look at it from the small blocks we can do on a weekly or monthly basis to the larger blocks when we’re planning by the quarter or the year, you can start to fill out a calendar where those days will start to add up. You will regularly getting your pit stops, your change of tires, so that you’re constantly at your best. You’ve got the energy, you’ve got the excitement. It’s okay to be in the pit lane. It’s okay. That’s where some of the planning happens. That’s where you get to refuel so that you can go faster and longer than your competitors. But if we don’t do it, you will run out of gas, and you will spin out in the curves.
So, the last one is daily. We hit on that with Cyril. If you are trying to squeeze more than fifty-five hours of work into every week, you are not being effective. In fact, you’re the opposite. You’re actually wasting your energy now. There’s that tipping point between fifty and fifty-five hours where you’re doing the motions, but nothing much is happening. So, that’s just wasted effort. Maybe it’s to impress somebody else, to brag about your hours, but that’s all wrong. We have to get out of that mindset.
So, think of it first on an annual basis. If that’s too much, work it down to maybe, “What can I do this quarter?” If that’s too much, you can ask can I take off like a Friday or two this month?” And then, you can look down to the week. Is there just even a half day that I can unplug? And sometimes, when I do that, I’m washing the car, I’m going to the dentist for a cleanup. Maybe I’m running errands. But that stuff hangs out in my brain when I don’t get to do it, and it just takes up bandwidth.
So, even those little breaks, if they don’t feel like a break, you’re working on your home life, not your work life. They actually do restore in a sense. They give you some of those, kind of, brainwaves back.
So, let’s just recap. I want you to rest like a race car driver. I want you to put boulders in the stream first, and if you plan it, the work will flow around it. Trust me. Now, when you look at your calendar and someone wants to book you for that week or that weekend, you can say, “Hey, I’m sorry. I’m gonna be on vacation. Can we do it the following Monday?” Nobody complains about this. They’ll say, “Well, I can’t wait that long. Can we do it before?” You can always maneuver the work around it if you plan for it.
If you employ people, you want to preach this. In January, at the end of the year, you want to be talking to your people and saying, “Hey, have you guys planned your vacation for next year?” This was a constant source of irritation for me ’cause I live in Austin, Texas, and we have one of the most popular music festivals in the world, Austin City Limits, and none of the young people that worked for me actually planned to go until it was like a week before and someone would spring tickets on them. And now, we’re in our busiest season of the year, and they’re asking me at the last minute if they can take a Friday off and a Monday off ’cause they wanna go and dance around the green at Zilker Park. I love it, but now they’re giving me their job, so I can be a good boss when they could have planned it.
So, I got way ahead of it. I started telling people, “If you even imagine that you’re gonna go, let’s put in for the vacation now. We’ll plan for you to be gone. And guess what? If you don’t get tickets, if you decide that you want to save your pennies and do something else later, you can always work.” It’s just so much harder when that time is not blocked. So, you want to do it for yourself, you want to role model it for your employees, and you want to preach it.
And here’s the thing: when you teach it, I’ve covered this as well, you’re more likely to do it, right? ‘Cause if you say, “Have you planned your vacation for the year?” Some smart aleck is gonna say, “Well, have you?” And you need to be able to say, “Yeah, I’ve at least planned it through August,” or, “I’ve planned it through September. I got ahead and planned for my time off so that the work can flow around it.” It is a best practice if you’re wanting to have a great career, if you’re wanting to build an extraordinary business.
So, we’re gonna close it out, and I want to give you a small challenge between today and next week’s episode, whether that be seven days or 17 hours, I want you to pause, I want you to open up your calendar, and I want you to time block a minimum a half day off. If you wanna go farther, awesome. But let’s just start wherever you are. But the challenge here is for you to go to your calendar and block off time and communicate it to the people who might need you. Tell your spouse, tell your partner, tell your team, “Hey, letting you guys know I’m taking the third Friday off this month.” What are you doing? I don’t know, but I know I’m going to need it. That’s your challenge. Go ahead, put a boulder in the stream as big as you can think of, and start this practice today.
So, you heard me mention it in the episode. If you would like to get some hands-on help with your time blocking, if you’d like a little accountability by doing it with others, please think about joining us for The ONE Thing Summit and Goal-Setting Retreat. It’s gonna be on November 13th and 14th from 1:00 to 4:00 Central Time. It’s virtual, so you can attend from anywhere in the world. Even if that time happens to be when you blocked for your goal-setting retreat, you can do it with me and Wendy. We’ll be leading you through some of the exercises and provide that kind of accountability that you will hear others doing the same thing that you’re doing, and you can do it together.
If you won’t do it alone, do it together. Do it with us at The ONE Thing Summit and Goal-Setting Retreat, November 13th and 14th between 1:00 and 4:00. Buy your tickets today. It’s at the1thing.com/summit. There’s a link in the podcast notes. Okay, we’ll see you next week.
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Disclaimer:
This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guest represent those of the guest and not ProduKtive or Keller Williams Realty LLC and their affiliates and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information
