Why Leaders Need To Disconnect & Recharge — Day 23 of 365 Leadership Blogging
It was pretty easy for us to come up with this title as we just returned from a two day break. We didn’t go anywhere, we didn’t even travel but we took some time out from our busy schedule, despite having some important deadlines.
We have often heard that leaders, especially business leaders should purposely schedule in recharge time on a frequent basis, in their packed diaries. What leaders do with that time is entirely up to them but it should be experiences or activities that take them out of their normal environment of living and thinking. The benefits are huge and Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix agrees “It is helpful. You often do your best thinking when you’re off hiking in some mountain or something. You get a different perspective on things.” We didn’t go off hiking in the mountains but we did have some thinking time. John Donahoe, former eBay CEO calls this “thinking days” and advocates they should be pencilled in every few months.
As a busy young professional family even we can get caught in the run of the mill daily hustle. The talk of a family holiday is always exciting but never quite takes off from the conversation unless we put a firm date in the diary and book the flights. Our priorities shift from day to day so having a plan is a useful guide but like Mike Tyson said: “everybody has a plan until they get in the ring and get punched in the face” — hopefully you get the point.
Your life may be different from ours but everyone has there own challenges to keep balanced so they can be the best they can be at all times. Without a recharge and some quality time with yourself or your loved ones, it becomes difficult to keep up a 100% performance rate and the story always ends the same — burn out.
Here are some things we do to keep a balance in our busy lives:
- Overly communicate with each other
- Have joint diaries
- Avoid conflicting priorities
- Make joint decisions
- Assess resources — times, people, skills, money
- Centralise information
- Plan in downtime
If reading this blog nudges you to plan in some downtime or thinking days, then we are glad we wrote and shared it with you. Your capacity to do more is very dependent on how fulfilled you are as an individual. Do more by doing less and get those recharge dates in the diary.
