John Fitch - Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress

Copyright 2020 John Fitch and Max Frenzel

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

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Paperback: 978-1-734-7944-0-3 E-book: 978-1-7347944-2-7

First paperback edition May 2020

Edited by Ann Maynard Copyedited by Susan Cahill Illustrations by Mariya Suzuki Layout and Design by Nikki Ellis

Time Off LLC 1502 Newning Ave.Austin TX 78704 United States

timeoffbook.com

To all the brave leaders, free spirits, creatives, full-time parents, entrepreneurs, early retirees, dreamers, and other time off evangelists past and present who had the courage to break away from the grind, the hustle, and the busyness, and show through their example and rest ethic how much can be achieved when time off is take n seriously.

CONTENTS

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What Is Time Off?

Picture this:

• You go on a long walk in the woods or the park near your home with no intended destination or purpose. Then, toward the end of your stroll, you suddenly have an aha! moment about a prominent project youve been working on. You know exactly what idea to pursue next.
• You need to focus, so you put your phone on do-not-disturb mode or press the sleep button on your tablet. As the notifications disappear, your creat ivity soars.
• You unwind after a solid day of effort, sigh as you hit the comfy mattress, and close your eyes before fading into eight hours of deep sleep. You wake up refreshed and greet the day with enthusiasm.
• Having completed an exciting chapter of your career, you decide not to jump straight into the next big thing but instead book a mini sabbatical. You travel to Italy to learn how to make pasta, or maybe go camping in New Zealand for a few weeks. Your only goal is to discover whats next for your life story.
• Three beautiful hours fly by on a Wednesday afternoon thanks to the flow state you found yourself in while taking a break from your desk to get lost in a hobby.
• The sound of a long-time friends deep laugh has you cracking up, while you both linger over a two-hour dinner. For once, you arent talking about work but rather how crazy you both w ere as kids.
• You end a long phone call with your parents. You are grateful you made the time to connect because you are not sure how many more of those conversations yo u have left.

Did visualizing these moments bring you any feelings of peace? When was the last time you experienced moments like this? How often do you allow yourself to break away from being busy? And is your busyness even achieving all that much in the first place?

We commonly think of rest as the opposite of work. We either rest, or we are productive. Hear the words time off, and its easy to default to thinking about the weekend or the vacation time granted to you at work. You might picture yourself sitting on the couch playing video games or lying on the beach sipping cocktails. But this book isnt about vacations, at least not primarily. This book is also not a call to be lazy, nor is it an instruction manual for slacking off. Far from it! Time Off is about the practices that keep us from feeling overwhelmed and overworked; practices that allow us to live happier, richer, more fulfilled lives; practices that, somewhat counterintuitively (although we hope that it will seem very obvious by the end of this book), allow us to be our most productive and creative selves. And we need them now mor e than ever.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in their International Classification of Diseases as an occupational phenomenon. Stress, anxiety, and disillusionment are more prevalent than ever before, especially among millennials. Overwhelm and overwork are stifling our creativity and crippling our society.

As much as we may like to think of ourselves as robots who can run effectively around the clock, we need distance from the daily hustle. Even if we could work at full capacity, day in and day out, we shouldnt. A lot of the wonderful parts of the human experience center on rest, reflection, and recovery. Our minds and bodies need a reprieve from the constant pressure and demands on our time and brainpower. If we want to accomplish the big things weve set out to do to create, lead, contribute, and make an impact we need a rest ethic as strong as our work ethic.

Finding Your Rest Ethic

Take in a deep breath and hold it.

Keep holding. How long can you hold your inhale until it gets uncomfortable? Thirty seconds? A few minutes? It doesnt take long until we all, eventually, nee d to exhale.

Think of your work ethic as the inhale (it is, in a way, as essential to your career as air is to your body). With a good work ethic, we make, execute, coordinate, manage, fulfill, and get things done. Task list inhale. Project execution inhale. Making our ideas come to li fe inhale.

But we cant keep inhaling forever. Eventually we have to exhale. This exhale is your rest ethic, and it is just a s essential.

A solid rest ethic gifts us inspiration, ideas, and recovery. It allows us to build up our enthusiasm and sustain our passion. Gaining a fresh perspective exhale. Project ideation and aha moments exhale. Letting big ideas incubate in your mind exhale. And just as a deep exhale prepares you for a better inhale, your rest ethic enables you to have a better work ethic.

Before we explore the idea of rest ethic any further, lets first define what makes a good work ethic, since this is all too often confused with simply working hard. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson provide a great definition in their book It Doesnt Have to Be Cr azy at Work :

A great work ethic isnt about working whenever youre called upon. Its about doing what you say youre going to do, putting in a fair days work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck.

We couldnt have said it better ourselves. Excessive hours dont guarantee quality work. And quality work, not quantity or busywork, is what a good work ethic is all about. Now, there are plenty of fantastic books out there about improving and refining your work ethic. Titles like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , Relentless , Mastery , and Turning Pro have got you covered. Our focus here will be on your rest ethic, leisure, and the wellspring of creativity and impactful ideas your time off can produce.

So, what might a well-designed rest ethi c look like?