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Discover why taking regular breaks from productivity is a good idea.
Corresponding blogposts with all the links: https://monthlymethod.com/breaks-from-productivity/
Achieve your goals 3 weeks at a time: https://monthlymethod.com/enroll/
Support this podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/monthly_method
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:53 - How we do montly breaks under the Monthly Method
01:55 - When you don’t take breaks from productivity
02:40 - Working during this week off
03:22 - Benefit #1: It prevents burnout.
04:57 - Benefit #2: It adds to the quality of your life.
06:24 - Benefit #3: You don’t rebel against the system. The key to consistency.
09:35 - Benefit #4: It gives you an opportunity to reflect on your sprint.
11:06 - Benefit #5: It allows you to think big.
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Your host, Polina Bee, is a certified SCRUM master. She brings a proven record of launching successful projects, both professional and personal.
You will hear about tested techniques that lead to calm, consistency and results.
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Today, we're going to talk about taking breaks from productivity, why you should do it. And
what is the impact of a monthly week off that we have in the monthly method.
📍 So when you sign up for the monkey method, we go through a three-week sprint and then we have a week off. I call it maintenance week. And what I usually tell my clients is that during this week you are not supposed to do anything related to productivity.
All your goals are. Done. And this is a nice break for you to have in between your sprints.
And it's not that you're not getting anything done during this week. It's that you operate on a very kind of like low effort level. I call it maintenance week. Basically if you're an employee, you just show up for your work and you do things.
That you need to get done in order not to get fired and same for business owners, you do the things that you need to do on the weekly basis for your business to operate, but you don't get involved in any of the new initiatives, new projects. You don't work on the new habits. You just give yourself a break.
I came up with this week off because I've made this mistake so many times where I would go for a long stretches of time, focusing too much on the productivity, focusing too much on the goals that eventually I would burn out, I would rebel against the system and all of that.
And then I would take this extended break from productivity where all the habits. Built throughout the productive period would get destroyed and then they have to start from scratch and it was a never ending cycle. But what they learned to realize is that when you take this week off, every month you take this week off, you become much more consistent.
And it's a lot easier for your psyche to work three weeks at a time and then take a break. And then again, three weeks at a time. So let's look at some of the benefits that you get from taking a week off every month. Again, it's not that you have to go on vacation during that week.
It's just that you take it easy. You don't expect too much from yourself. You are not building new habits. You're not waking up at 4:00 AM. And none of that is like very low effort daily activities that you need to do in order to sustain yourself, sustain your business, sustain your employment, but nothing extra.
***
The first benefit that you get is of course you prevent burnout. During this week, , you can sleep in, you can finish work earlier. You know, if you have higher autonomy of your time, if you're a business owner, if you're someone.
Who is in creative fields, or if you're a professor or a student where basically it's up to you to decide when to start and when to finish your work day. So you can give yourself plenty of free time. You can book. Relaxing activities for this week. You can book a lot more social engagements during this week, you know, kind of do the things that you need to do in order to recharge and get your energy resources up to a needed level to
engage in the activities that you want to do.
But don't usually have time to do again. Really important to understand that it's important to do the activities from your want to list. And if you don't know why check out the previous episode,
it will walk you through the need-to to verses want-to to activities and how they're all connected.
So first point. Taken a regular week off, avoid burnout, and I've been doing it for years. And I can say that it actually works. Even though like during this week, you might still need to go to work. You might still need to show up for a business. It's not that you go on vacation, but mentally, because you're not pushing yourself too hard.
You're not expecting too much of yourself. It feels like a break.
***
The second benefit that you get as that you can do fun things during this week that adds to the quality of your life. Something that they've mentioned in the previous episode, you can spend more time on the things that you want to do.
. Maybe it's going to a place that you wanted to go, but that is a bit further from your house or maybe it's going on the mini road trip, or maybe it's going to a new restaurant or maybe it's exploring a new neighborhood, you know, because you have more time. You're not focusing on a bunch of, to dues.
You can actually do fun things that adds to the quality of your life. And again, this activities are, what creates fun memories are the things that add to the flavor and colors and overall amazing experience of being alive. So you never want to miss on those things and having the week during your month where you're not too occupied with becoming the superhuman with all the, to do's and morning routine, and evening routine and optimizing the heck out of your day, when you have the speak off, when you can do the fun things and really helps to do them on a regular basis, and that keeps your mood high and the level of enjoyment for your life actually increases.
***
Okay. The third benefit that you get is that you don't rebel against the system and it is the key to consistent. Honestly, I think this is my favorite point, and it's the most important one. When you give yourself enough breaks throughout the process, you don't rebel against the system.
Oftentimes when we try a new productivity tool in you I didn't know, diet exercise plan because it doesn't account for those breaks. We get tired. Physically psychologically, and our brain starts to look for all the excuses that would allow us to stop doing this method, stop doing this activity. It will find the reason to rebel against that.
But when you give yourself enough time, your psyche has enough time to relax, recharge, and then do it again with this new energy and new resources. And you never get to the point where you are too tired too burned out. So you never give your brand and the opportunity to just start rebelling against the city.
When you don't rebel against the system, you show up for it consistently. It's only a three weeks at a time. And then you always get the break. You only work for three weeks and then you have a week of quote, unquote, vacation. Isn't it. Awesome. I think one of the main reasons why I have returned in clients and they return every month and they don't need to take breaks throughout our time working together is because every month they have a week off from all the goals, all the predictivity, all of that.
And they get to do whatever they want to do during this week. And I'm not bothering you. And this is awesome. And then they were fresh, energetic. They come back and we start again and we work for three weeks. Then we'll reflect, they take a break and then they come back and this is beautiful.
I haven't had a single client who would say to me, well, I'm too tired. I need a break for three months. No, because they all have the opportunity to relax, recharge and come back again.
And this is the lesson that they want you to learn for maybe your other goals and aspirations. If you're having troubles with consistency. Look, if you give yourself enough breaks throughout the process, are you pushing yourself too hard? And it doesn't matter what goal it is. Is it diet and working out work related goals or health related goals?
It doesn't matter like, but you need to account for breaks and you need to give yourself enough breaks and you don't have to be physically tired. A lot of the times it's psychological.
You psychologically need to take a break from always asking more of yourself. And for this week, you kind of content with your life and you are not striving for more and you give yourself a break from all of the thriving, from all the pursuit of more. Isn't it. Nice. And then you're ready to do more.
***
Okay. Next benefit from taking the week off is that it gives you an opportunity to reflect on your sprint.
So if you have a call on the first day of the client's week off. And we do the sprint review. In scrum, it's called sprint retrospective. So I walk them through the questions and it gives them the opportunity to review those previous three weeks to see how there's print went, to see what can be improved.
And then throughout the week, they keep kind of thinking and reflecting on their sprint what they can do different next week. And that's important. To give yourself enough time to reflect on your activities on your journey towards her goal. , because this is the key to continuous improvement, a lot of people are talking about embracing continuous improvement, but you can't really do that.
If you're in the hustle mode all the time. Because when you were hustling 24 7, you don't have free time available to actually pause and think back and analyze and strategically decide what can be improved because reflection requires time and it requires free space. You couldn't really do it when you have a hundred of, to do's on your calendar for that particular day.
So you need the white space to reflect.
***
And this also brings me to the next point, having this Widespace allows you to think big picture. It allows you to step back from the daily grind and look at your life from the big picture level, from the bird's eye view.
And usually it takes you a couple days to shift the gears from, you know, go, go, go, go to pause, reflect, and kind of zoom out and look at your life from another perspective. . This allows you to ask important questions. It allows you to think maybe five years had to see REO on the right track.
Are you happy? Are you doing the things that you want to be doing, or are you just going through the motion? And again, you need very different state of mind, in order to do the reflection and also the planning. You can't really do that in between answering a hundred emails. No, because it requires a very different mindset.
So during this week I asked my clients, well, first of all, to think about their previous print , do some reflections, do some, dig in, look into some of them. thoughts that caused some of the actions, but I'm not going to go into details here about that. But I also asked them to start brainstorming the goals that they want to focus on for the next sprint.
And remember when I was small, every time I would go on vacation with my family, my dad will always tell me. And my dad is an entrepreneur. So. Every time, he would not want to go on vacation because there are hundreds of things that he needs to get done in his business. And my mom would, all of us have such a hard time convincing my dad to go on vacation, but then every single time we would go on this, like two week vacation, he would come back and every time he would tell me that this time allowed him to zoom out, think about his business.
Thinks strategically of where he wants to go. And every time he would like change something in his business after he returns from vacation
and this happened every single time. And at first I was like, that's interesting. How come all this strategic changes are correlated with us going on vacation, but now I understand why. ' I even remember my dad, you know, the first few days his attached to his cell phone, he's still in that mood of daily grind, answering emails putting out fires and all of that.
And then it takes him few days to actually slow down and get into this different state of mind. Very reflective, very. Long thought deep thought kind of mind. And he would just spend hours on the beach, just not even reading. I think he would just , think. And that allowed him to step back.
Look at his life, look at his business, see how it's going, what needs to be improved and kind of connect all the different pieces together. 'cause when you're in the daily grind, you only see a little distance in front of you. Just this one task, just this one email at marks you see a week
worth of appointments, meetings calls, but you never look further. And so when you step back, you kind of zoom out and you look at different pieces. You look at your work at your health, at your family, seeing the connections, how they work together, how the stress at work impacts your health, impacts your family, and then see what you can do about it.
Because when you're in the daily task management, you don't really see this connections. So not only it's important to go on vacation throughout the year, but also have those regular breaks from productivity where you create this white space.
***
okay guys. I think I've convinced you that it's useful to take breaks from productivity. Again, you don't, all of this have to thrive for more, do better, do more, do faster.
Go further. Sometimes it's more productive to stop, , do the bare minimum and step back
and look at this whole thing from the bird's eye. And that's when you get the biggest insights, that's when you can actually make the decisions that will fundamentally change your life.
Okay. My friends that's it for today. If you want to go through the entire cycle of the monthly method from sprint planning, weekly planning to sprint review, to the maintenance week and what you need to do during this week. What kind of questions you need to ask yourself to better prepare for the next print, check out monthly method.com. All the information is there and subscribe to the podcast. If you want to have a freshly baked episode delivered to you next Monday.
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