Don't burn out.

If you don’t schedule downtime, it will be scheduled for you, in the form of injury or burnout.

(Paraphrased) Visakan Veerasamy

There’s a good chance that you, dear reader, are making a living by exchanging time for money. This is ultimately not the ideal approach, but we’ve all got to start somewhere, and “time for money” is well-understood.

This being the case, you’re probably starting to think about how much each hour of your time is worth.

And how much it costs you to not be working.

Two-week vacation? It’s not just the flights and the food; you’re out 80-ish hours of billable time–and the higher your rate, the more that “costs”. If you’re engaged full-time with a client at $200/hour, you’re out $16k. Yikes!

The thing is: that’s bullshit.

Here’s why: you can’t just work full-time continuously forever. Your body will stop working. You will burn out. You will go numb. And you will stop being able to work, and have to spend (non-billable!) time recovering just to get back to baseline. And you’ll probably be unhappy the whole time.

Don’t burn out. Schedule your downtime. Take a vacation; you’ll have to spend the time one way or another, and better to choose it than have fate choose for you