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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
It's important to just give yourself the time off. It's valuable in and of itself. And then b, from a productivity lens, we do have a real tendency to come back more energized, more focused, more creative than ever before. Very similarly to how when you let a field lay fallow or plant cover crops, it actually is very reenutrienting to the soil. So that kind of time off, I think of it as re nutrienting to our metaphorical soil.
Kate Northrup:Welcome to Plenti. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of hunting. Let's go fill our cups.
Voice Over:Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrop or anyone who works within the Kate Northrop brand.
Kate Northrup:Let's talk about how to prepare to take a chunk of time off in your business without being worried that you're gonna have to scramble or lose momentum or become irrelevant or whatever fears might come up around taking a chunk of time off. Now, I wanna be clear that I did not take extended chunks of time off until I was several years into my business. So if you're in day 1 in your business, this may be a dream to put on the vision board like a few years down the road because it the reason I will often take a chunk of time off in the summer to be with my kids and just to savor life is that I have some momentum to ride on from the deposits I've been putting in from consistency over years years. So I would say our first key here is number 1, consistency. When we are consistent in our on seasons, we can have the luxury of just taking some time off.
Kate Northrup:And in fact, there's some couple things I've learned about, like, for sure, the Instagram algorithm and maybe possibly the podcast algorithm, we're gonna explore this and try it out ourselves, is that taking some taking a break actually allows when you come back on from an algorithmic perspective to get bigger traction and bigger engagement. So I've been practicing, for example, taking a day in between posting stories, and I'm noticing I have higher story views as a result. Now that's, you know, stuff Instagram trip tips are not in any way timeless, which is why I usually don't talk about them, but that's just been working for me lately. But the same is true of your system. So I think everything externally is just a mirror and a metaphor for what's going on inside of us.
Kate Northrup:And any of our tech tools that we have created as humans are just mirrors of our own wiring anyway. And what's true is that when we give ourselves the gift of some time off, we come back with more creativity, more focus, more energy, more joy, and that's why I love scheduling in full blocks of time off when I have prepared for them well. Sometimes I take time off because I just need to, you know, if I'm sick or something's going on with the kids or whatever. But for today's purposes, we're talking about taking intentional time off. I will also say this.
Kate Northrup:When we don't take intentional time off, our bodies will find time for us. So if you haven't taken a break in a while, this is your reminder that eventually your body's gonna make you take a break. So why not take it intentionally and plan for it and have it be a pleasurable experience as opposed to being an experience where you're sick or injured or having to do it reactively. So this is about proactive time off. Okay.
Kate Northrup:So number 1 is when you are consistent, meaning you've consistently shown up with content, you've consistently shown up with emailing your list or communicating with your potential customers or in whatever way makes sense for you in your industry from a consistency's perspective. When you've been consistent, then it you have basically put in deposits energetically where you have more freedom and flexibility to take off. I've been in business in some way, shape, or form for 20 years. Folks know that they can really depend on me to be communicative, to show up. And so if I'm off for 6 weeks, nobody's wondering, like, oh, is she ever gonna respond?
Kate Northrup:Is she ever gonna show back up? No. There's enough of a history of cadence of showing up consistently and always turning back up that there's no interruption of that trust factor within my extended online community, but also within the community that is my closer circle of colleagues and friends. So consistency, number 1. Number 2, I like to plan nicely ahead.
Kate Northrup:So it's I'm currently recording this episode in June. I wouldn't, like, be like, oh, it's now halfway through June. I'm gonna take July August off. Let me see how I can work that out. For me, that would not be a long enough runway to prepare.
Kate Northrup:Now we do run, you know, a multiple seven figure company. We have team members. We don't have a giant team by any means. It's it's small. But it just wouldn't be respectful of our team or our customers to just, like, take off in 2 weeks.
Kate Northrup:So when Mike and I always sit down to plan out our year, we do that between Christmas and New Year's usually from a personal perspective. From a company perspective, we're trying to move that further back so that basically the next year is planned around October, certainly by mid November. We plan that out, and I always know, like, hey, my kids are out of school in the summer. They're getting older and quite frankly, way more fun. And so I really wanna spend this time with them, and so this will be my 3rd year in a row that I've taken a solid chunk to be mostly not working and really, like, read books, lay in a hammock, go to the beach, hang out with friends, hang out with Mike, hang with the kids, and be in summer chill mode.
Kate Northrup:What that looks for me like for me this summer is a little different than it did years past. I think in honesty, I didn't realize that I was actually burned out the 1st year I did this, and I really was needing, like, full unplugged time. I really Mike had been sick. This is 2021, summer of 2021. Mike had been really sick, then he had broken his knee, then we were having all this stuff behind the scenes with family and the pandemic and political stuff.
Kate Northrup:And then there were some stuff going on within our team and our company, and I just, like, really needed to unplug. In retrospect, mostly, I just needed the break because I was burned out. At this point, a couple years down the down the line, I'm not feeling that right now, and so I actually will be working a little bit more during the 6 weeks. And the nature of it will be that there's 1 week where I'm completely offline. I won't be on social.
Kate Northrup:I won't be on email. I won't be on Voxer. I won't be checking in with the team. I'm just gonna be with Mike. It's our 10th wedding anniversary, and we are going to Columbia.
Kate Northrup:We wanted to do something different, but we don't have a huge chunk of time, like, enough to go overseas, so we were going there. Same time zone, pretty much, 1 hour apart and only a 3 hour flight from Miami, and we're excited. So I knew that that was gonna be a week totally off, but the rest of the weeks, I'm delivering relaxed money, and it is one of the most joyful things I do. I love it. I teach it live on purpose because I love teaching it live.
Kate Northrup:It is our signature program. We did decide that I'm we're only doing it one time a year, which has allowed me to give it even more of my time and energy knowing that the next time I teach it will be in 2025. So this is a vote for doing less as and as a result, being able to do it better. I know that I'm delivering relaxed money better because I know that I can leave it all on the dance floor. I don't need to save anything up in terms of, like, turning around and then relaunching and then delivering it again in 6 months.
Kate Northrup:I'm not gonna be doing it again for a year. So I'm delivering relaxed money once a week for an hour, which requires me to, prep the slides and review the handouts and just and that sort of prep. So that's a few hours of prep plus 1 hour of teaching, and then there's, like, a group coaching call here and there. I think there's just 1 in July and 1 in August, and those are 1 hour. So that's pretty much my whole work commitments.
Kate Northrup:I think maybe I have one or 2 other Zooms scheduled. But one thing I did this year that I highly, highly recommend, I hadn't done it before, but I decided rather than book podcast interviews, not not for my podcast, not for Plenty, but for when I'm on other people's podcast, I used to kind of just, like, book them whenever and I would just fit them in. So when I got invited on someone's podcast that I wanted to say yes to, I would look at their schedule and my schedule, and we would just find the soonest available opening that intersected for both of us. I don't do it that way anymore. Occasionally, I will, but here's what I've been doing that I love, so please take this if it works for you.
Kate Northrup:I decided to, instead of just do a bunch of podcast interviews all through January, all through February, and all through March, to I decided to have 1 week where the person who schedules my podcast interviews tried to schedule as many of them as possible all in the same week as in I needed to have a, you know, a top on with some visual interest, and I was just in podcasting mode that week. Now some of you who've been following along for a while, you might be wondering, oh, were you able to schedule it while you were ovulating? So you were in that high energy phase and you were like, verbally your most, fluent and all of that stuff. No. Unfortunately, like, actually, in the end, I did end up being ovulating that week, which was just sort of by luck or synchronicity, but I don't know that far in advance, like, if that's gonna be happening.
Kate Northrup:So just so you know, in case you were wondering, I just was like, this will be luck of the draw. We'll see where I am in my cycle, and I did end up being at a at a peak time for for high energy and connection, which was really awesome. So I did that, and then I decided rather than also rather than just then try to fit in podcast episodes here and there in May, June, July, and August, I chose a week in September that will be another podcast interview batching. So all the podcast interview requests that are coming in right now, we're scheduling them for this 1 week in September, and then I'll probably do, like, another week in December or January, and then another week in March. So I'll try to have basically 3 weeks a year where I batch in as many of the podcast interviews that, are possible that are virtual so that I'm not switching context a lot.
Kate Northrup:I'm sure if you've been a student of productivity work for a while, you've heard about context switching. So context switching is when we go from, like, okay, now I'm having an internal meeting with my team. Now I'm creating content. Now I'm on Instagram. Now I'm responding to DMs.
Kate Northrup:Now I'm in my, project management software. Now I'm trying to write an email. Now I'm on a podcast interview. Now I'm coaching. Like, when we context switch from doing one thing to another thing, it wastes a ton of energy and getting refocused and back in the mode of what we are actually supposed to be focused on can take sometimes 15 to 20 minutes.
Kate Northrup:Like, it can actually take a long time, and I write about a lot of this data in chapter 2 of do less. So if you're a data nerd like I am, go check out all that data on actually what is evidence based in terms of our best practices for our most productive selves. But I know that for me, if I'm trying to switch context and toggle in and out of internal program delivery, content creation, marketing, like, all this stuff, and then I'm, like, also popping into podcast interviews throughout the day, it's disorienting for me, and it's it I go from, like, on to in to out to. And so having this one week where I did them all, I was like, oh, this is risky. I could be a total spud by the end of the week, like, I might be a limp noodle.
Kate Northrup:But actually, by Friday night at the end of the week, I was going out on a date with Mike and I was so amped up. Like, it it was a little much for him, honestly. I was, like, very chatty, and he was, like, you really are a lot. But because I had had the joy of talking to really interesting people all week and being in my flow all in the same context, I was able to I was so energized by that. I'm also an extrovert, so, like, that sort of thing is deeply energizing to me.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So that's one thing, and that's just in the category of batching. Now that won't make sense for everyone. Not everyone is trying to batch a bunch of podcast interviews where you're going on other people's podcasts, but perhaps you need to batch a bunch of your social media content ahead of time or your emails or your blogs or your own podcast, we are batching episodes of this podcast. So my podcast today, we're batching a bunch of solo episodes, and on other days, we batch guest episodes.
Kate Northrup:So on the day that I'm podcasting, I am not also meeting with the team, doing all these other things. I'm here. I'm on camera. I'm with you. I get my hair and makeup done once, and then I change outfits in between, and occasionally I change earrings as well.
Kate Northrup:And that allows me to be in the mode. It allows our team to be in the mode. We get it all done. And that is one of the strategies that I use to be able to then take a bunch of time off because I've harnessed the time and energy and focus and creativity of creating one kind of thing all at once and then we're done for up to at this point, we could actually run podcasts all the way through mid September, and we would be good to go. We wouldn't need to create a new episode.
Kate Northrup:And that feels really good. I will tell you as someone who has previously spent years doing things last minute, that's one of my own nervous system patterns that I have worked on healing over time is feeling safer and safer with more spaciousness. Now having this level of spaciousness, it used to feel like a threat to my system and will link in the show notes. There's an episode that I did about slowing down and why that can feel really stressful and how to slow down without it feeling like a threat, so we'll link that for you. So it used to feel like a real threat to me to have this amount of spaciousness, and now I savor it.
Kate Northrup:Now it feels like luxury nutrient in in certain ways, and I don't think I could ever go back to the level of scrambling I used to do. Like, in the early days of our podcast, when Mike and I did the Kate and Mike show starting in 2016, we would often be recording the podcast, like, the night before it was supposed to go live or, like, a day before it was supposed to go live. And then we would start the next week and be like, what are we podcasting about this weekend? And, again, like, there's nothing it doesn't make mean that the quality or the value was less in what we produced, but it it was it was a level of pressure and stress that I have just evolved out of needing in order to feel alive. And now I have over time moved from fueling my business and my life from stress and pressure to fueling my business and my life more from pleasure and savoring.
Kate Northrup:It is a continued work in progress. This is in no way perfect. So, okay, we talked about consistency, we talked about batching, we've talked a little bit about the nervous system, of course, because I can't help it. And I also wanna say when you're take taking a look at taking some time off, it's also a wonderful time to look at what you do consistently, the ways you show up consistently, certainly if you're an online business owner or if you're a business owner of any kind, like, what do you do week in and week out? Write it down.
Kate Northrup:Write it down. Okay. I send an email to my list. I post on Instagram, you know, 5 days a week. I show up in my course.
Kate Northrup:I show up in my online community. I do my coaching calls, I, you know, whatever what have you. Right? And look at that list and ask which one of these things could I actually experiment with putting on pause? So actually, just before we hit record, we decided to experiment with taking a hiatus on the podcast and putting it on pause, not because we don't have enough episodes.
Kate Northrup:Actually, we have more than enough episodes, but just to see, like, a, that's in alignment with our brand and with doing less to have more. Also, people don't need a a new episode every single week. Like, you've got plenty of things to listen to. Let's all take a break, shall we? And we're just gonna experiment with what is it going to look like from our production cycle, what is it gonna look like from our process cycle internally as a company, and then also just interestingly, what's it gonna look like to our metrics and to our data of podcast downloads to have the month of August where we are on hiatus, where we're pausing between the 1st year of plenty and the 2nd year of plenty.
Kate Northrup:So we'll see. I'll let you know. Make sure you're on my email list because that is likely not an entire podcast episode that I would record, but I can I can write an email about it? So that's something that I recommend for you to do is to take a look at what is your normal list of production, what is your normal list of things that you make on a given week or ways you show up and ask yourself, which one of these could I put on pause during this time? Or alternatively, and I I did this during my 2 maternity leaves.
Kate Northrup:So when I had Penelope, I took 3 months off. When I took had Ruby, I think I scheduled for a full month off, but I ended up taking 5 months off to some degree. And what I did for both of those times, at that time, I was doing a weekly a weekly blog post and also for Ruby, also a weekly podcast. So Mike and I batched our podcast for a month for before Ruby was born, and then we started podcasting live again after she was a month old. But for Penelope's maternity leave, I had a series of blog babysitters.
Kate Northrup:So instead of me writing a blog every single week for that 3 months, I asked 12 people who I absolutely love and adore, who I thought my audience would love and adore, and they each wrote a guest post, and we had an assistant be able to format their posts and and do all of that and send those out. And so that was also really fun. It was a great way to share people I loved with our community, continue to serve our community in a consistent way, give visibility to those people that I asked, and then also to to be able for me to take that time off and take 12 weeks off of writing a weekly blog. So that was kind of an unusual or, like, a out of the box way to do it, but it was like a win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win. I always love to think about, okay, if I'm not gonna do this thing, what could be a way to give an opportunity for somebody else to show up in this space and for my community to be able to receive while I'm on a break.
Kate Northrup:So that's an alternative way to think about it, and and hopefully that might have, sparked an idea for you. The other thing is I think communication is really key. In full transparency, this is something that in the past, I don't think I've done great at. So what we're doing internally is in a about a week a few days from now, we're sitting down with some of our key leadership team, and we are actually mapping out what are the deliverables for the summer? What are the expectations for the team?
Kate Northrup:What does need to happen during those 6 weeks while I'm not in as much production, but what are the things that could happen within the company that don't require me to be as on and as present? Because at this point in our business, you know, I started this business in 2,010 ish, 2,009, 2010. We're at a point where I do not have to be present for every single thing to happen. I also, at this point, don't have any amount of my identity or my value wrapped up in being needed in that way. As much as things can be created without me, I'm like, yes.
Kate Northrup:Hallelujah. So it's a wonderful thing to be able to sit down and communicate. Okay, great. So here are the expectations. Here's what other time off people have.
Kate Northrup:Here's how we're gonna play that Tetris for those summer weeks and figure out what are the objectives, what are the goals, and everybody knows what they are responsible for holding. I will be perfectly honest, I did not do a good job of that in the past, and so it's an area it's an area of growth, clear communication, and clearly making sure that everybody knows what they are responsible for so that things don't just kind of stall out while I'm not as in the mix. And that's, you know, again, that's gonna be like an ongoing evolution. So let me just summarize. One, when you've been consistent for a long time, you can have the luxury of taking more time off.
Kate Northrup:Number 2, giving yourself a nice long runway. So I've been prepping and planning for this time off for at least 5 months, really knowing that I'm going to take that time so I'm not needing to cancel a bunch of things. Right? I'm not needing to tell the team last minute, oh, I'm not gonna be available, like everyone pretty much knows. So giving yourself a nice long runway, batching where appropriate and where you can, and then really looking at what can you actually just fully not do.
Kate Northrup:I am a huge fan of just fully not doing things, right? We don't always have to jam pack our schedule ahead of time so that we can take real time off. Sometimes you can just cancel something. Sometimes you can just be like, yeah, no. So I'm just, like, not gonna do that.
Kate Northrup:It's fine. The world doesn't really care. Like, let's be honest. None of us are as important as we think we are. No one really cares.
Kate Northrup:Like, I am not having any kind of delusion that anyone is actually going to care that the Plenty podcast is going to take a hiatus for the month of August. I am gonna tell you just because I think communication is important, but I I know that everyone has full robust lives, and it's really important to just give ourselves the time off because when we, a, it's important to just give yourself the time off. It's valuable in and of itself. And then, b, from a productivity lens, we do have a real tendency to come back more energized, more focused, more creative than ever before. Very similarly to how when you let a field lay fallow or plant cover crops, it actually is very re nutrienting to the soil.
Kate Northrup:So that kind of time off, I think of it as re nutrienting to our metaphorical soil. I hope this was helpful. I hope you take some time off. If you do, please send me a DM, let me know, and have a beautiful summer. Thanks for listening to this episode of Plenty.
Kate Northrup:If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review. That's one of the best ways that you can ensure to spread the abundance of plenty with others. You can even text it to a friend and tell them to listen in. And if you want even more support to expand your abundance, head over to katenorthrop.comforward/breakthroughs, where you can grab my free money breakthrough guide that details the biggest money breakthroughs from some of the top earning women I know, plus a mini lesson accompanying it with my own biggest money breakthroughs and a nervous system healing tool for you to expand your abundance. Again, that's over at kate northrup.comforward/breakthroughs.
Kate Northrup:See you next time.