Scheduling breaks in the high season

You must schedule time to rest and recover, or it will be scheduled for you–typically at the least convenient time possible. (Paraphrased, many sources, including Tara Brach)

This is sage advice—and it’s broader than it looks at first blush.

Yes, by all means, take a break before you burn out or make yourself ill. And yes, certainly, learn to give your mind and body and anything else that comprises your human experience the time and space to not be always doing.

That’s already a difficult lesson—we all need to learn it more than once. But there’s variations and subtleties that get missed when we just hear this advice as Hey Have You Tried Mindfulness.

Oftentimes, you can anticipate times and situations where you’re going to have less in the tank. Your org has seasonal variations, and you’re coming up on a really high-traffic period. The holidays are coming, and your family often causes you strain. The anniversary of a big loss is coming up, and you’ve historically found it pretty hard. Flu season is here and a lot of your team has kids in school.

Building some breaks into all of this is counterintuitive. Why not try get ahead of things? Knowing there’s limitations on upcoming availability and emotional bandwidth at both personal and collective levels drives us to work ever-harder so we won’t fall behind when things go sideways. The actual result of this is that we spend on work all the time and energy that it would take to get through the hard stuff gracefully—and then the hard stuff knocks us on our collective asses without the resilience to get back up again.

Are you or your team facing down some strain that could affect your velocity? Before pushing harder, consider building in some rest.