You Need A Vacation | Multithreaded Income Episode 33

we're exploring the Italy countryside, starting our visit in Venice. I'm doing some gondola rides and stuff like that. Then we're taking the train down to Florence. We're hanging out in Florence for a couple days. Then finally we're settling in Rome. We're going to see the Colosseum. We're going to see all the good stuff that Rome has to offer before flying back to the United States. So while I'm saying I'm gone for two weeks, it's going to be a very packed two weeks.

But I thought, leading up to this trip, it was a good idea to talk with the multithreaded income community about the importance of taking time off and taking a vacation. So, recently, I went to the MTI community and asked them,

How often do you take time off work? And when you do, what do you do with that time? And I got some really great responses, and I think that's what we need to talk about today. Is how often do you take a vacation? So first of all, why is it important for us to take time off of our daily lives of our work? And one of the commenters had a really great point. And he said, I have made it a habit in the past to grind through the hard times.

And. You know that feeling most likely of you're working on something and you're working and you're working and you feel like you're not really taking steps forward, but you might be inching forward or even in some cases taking a step back.

And you feel that if you just put in the time and the grit that you will get past this and then you can take some time off and more often than not. That's not really the case. You can grind and you can grind and grind. You'll just burn yourself out. And overall, the thing that you're working on and the teams that you're working with are not going to benefit from you just putting in extra hours trying to get through different projects. So it's in our best interest when we it.

are working on these difficult problems that we just take time off every now and then we step away from the problem. We should step away from the problem and just go do something else. Like I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to sit here and quote studies that tell you that scientists say that it's better to do X, Y, and Z when you're feeling burnt out. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to give you my personal experience. I feel better when.

I leave work where work is and I go do something else. So that's important overall just

for mental health. When you're working, working, working, that's good. Like there's legitimate reasons why you should work and you should work hard and you should be good at your job, but you should also be good at taking the time away from work to go pursue other interests, to work on the. Quality of life of your family and you can always come back to the work. So I'm glad that we're having this conversation.

One of the questions I asked was how often should we take vacation or how often should we take time away? And I got a variety of different answers from the MTI community. And the first one that really stood out to me is sometimes the universe will just make you take the time. Uh, so there's one person in the entire NTI community who said he had to take time away from work. He had to rest because he ended up suffering from a concussion and we see this often.

The universe just says you need a break and it does it in the most, uh, almost painful way possible. Sometimes you are in an accident and you just have to lay low for a week or a couple of weeks. Sometimes you might have surgery and the surgery says you can't work, you can't get out of bed. You have to be on rest for a period of time so your body can heal. Sometimes it's more than that. You find yourself with more complicated health problems that just require you to take time away.

So if you are the type of person who works, works, works all the time, your body might just not need you to do that. Your body might just need you to rest. And I would never necessarily have thought about that if someone hadn't mentioned to me, I don't know. I took vacation, quote vacation, just because something happened and the only way I could heal appropriately was taking the time off.

And, man, we're sitting here talking about just the, the body aspects of it. Your, your head needs to heal, but yeah, your head sometimes needs to heal. It's a mental health issue. Taking the time away from your work can heal more than just your physical brain. It can also heal just your mental outlook on, on your life. So I thought that was a really great piece of feedback from the community. Now, getting into the conversation is just time, time, time.

A lot of folks said it's difficult to find the time because if you're a member of the MTI community, you might not necessarily have a real full time job and The biggest benefit of having a real full time job is that you get to pay time off PTO and that's great because you could say, I want to take a day off to go out with the kids, go hiking, go to amusement park, go do something fun. And other times you can say, oh, I want to take a week off.

We're going out of state to visit some family or relatives, and I'm just going to take that way from work and no one's going to bother me because I'm taking the PTO. If you're like me, I'm a independent consultant that worked for myself. A lot of you are freelancers, consultants, or you're building income in other non traditional ways from the full time job. When you're taking the time away from work, you're essentially just cutting off the faucet that is money.

So if you're not working, money is not coming in. We could have an entire discussion of just about how do you prepare for those times? That's not necessarily what I want to talk about today, but you should be thinking about this How do you put money away for the case where you want to take time off or the cases where? You need to take time off most importantly, so it's Time is money is really ringing true to a lot of the independent folks out there.

And it's not that just time is money and that you were when you're working, you're making money and you need to keep up this trend of money coming in. Stuff is expensive. So if you're not bringing money, are you paying your mortgage? Are you paying for your rent? Are you paying for your utilities? Are you putting clothes on your kids back? Are you putting food on the table? There's stuff. That needs to be paid for even if the money's not coming in. So how do you account for, for all that?

So it's difficult for us to take the time away from work if we're not in these full time job PTO environments. So the number one thing that a lot of people said in all these cases was I wish I took more time off and relate to that a hundred percent I will often look at my calendar and See that I have week after week after week of just work work work I have times I'm

traveling for conferences, but I usually work during the conference. So I'm not taking the time off there and Sometimes that bleeds over into weekends. So I'm working on weekends and It's just always go, go, go. And I'll look at the calendar and go, Okay, well, when in this time can I take a long weekend? Maybe take a Friday off or take a Thursday Friday off? And the answer is usually not very often because the work needs to get done. I need the money to keep coming in.

Let's fast forward to the Italy trip that I'm currently on and the amount of planning that went into that trip. So we started that planning back in I believe it was March 2023. My wife and I decided we wanted to take this trip. We started putting money away for it. We started working with a travel agent. And once we got all the checks marked, I then went to the clients that I was working with and told them, Here's a couple months notice. I'm not going to be available these two weeks.

Let's do everything that we need to prepare for me leaving. But when I'm out of the country, I'm not responding to your emails. I'm not returning your calls. I'm not going to work on these projects at all. Just pretend I don't exist. And that took, that took a lot of planning. And sometimes it's, it's difficult to put that much time and effort into planning your time away.

So everyone that says, I wish I took more time off, we found that a lot of folks are more content to taking just single days. So taking a Friday every month or so off in addition to their normal weekends. Uh, and I think that's a good rule. Some folks said they try to take two weeks off minimum a year. Also a good rule, but also remember there's 52 weeks in a year.

So taking just two weeks off means you are pushing the other 50 weeks of the year and that, that could drive you a little bit batty if, if you think about it that way. So try to strive to take more, more time off. Um, in dating relationships, I know this is in a relationship podcast, there's this thing called the two, two, two rule where you and your partner.

Should take a date every two weeks and you should have a date You should take a long weekend trip every two months and then you should take a week long vacation

every two years I think that similar concept can be used for just taking your PTO Make sure you're giving yourself that quality time Every couple weeks every couple months in every couple years to just get out and get away And I really A ton to just taking the personal day off because this feeds into the next question that We asked, which was, what do you do with the time that you're taking? And it really depends. If you're taking the week long vacation, it's probably a destination trip.

You're going somewhere, whether it's somewhere fun like Italy or it's somewhere fun. Like we took the kids to universal studios for a week. That was a lot of fun. Sometimes it's visiting your in laws in Michigan in the middle of winter. That doesn't seem as appealing as. Say, riding roller coasters in Universal Studios. But, you know, everyone makes their own fun in different ways. But, I digress. A lot of folks seem to appreciate more of the single day.

Take a, take a Friday every month and spin that doing something that isn't work related for me. A lot of the time is used on house projects. Just last weekend I took a afternoon and I fixed the fence in the backyard because my dog who's running around here somewhere decided to destroy a couple of the fence pickets and it was just something that had to get done. So I fixed the fence. Some folks said they used it to do some learning, some intensive learning.

Is there a new hobby you want to try or pick up? Use that extra day to go pick up that, that new bit of knowledge that you didn't have before. Uh, some folks just like thinking about the, the future.

What do I want to work on? And this very much fits into the MTI mindset. Is there a book you want to write or a course you want to build? Is there a conference talk that you are thinking about doing or submitting to a different conference? Taking some quality time to sit down and think intensely about these different topics is super beneficial to you and to everything that you're going to do in the future.

But This is a very long winded solo show and I'm going to try to wrap this up quickly by saying that if you haven't put some time on your calendar recently to just take a day off for yourself. And when I

say yourself, it could be just you. It could be with your. Spouse and your kids, your partner and your kids, your best friend. It could be just with your dog. Make sure you take that personal time away from the work that you're doing and use it as a moment to just refresh, reset your mind. So you can come back a little bit stronger afterwards. and do better work in the long run. With all that said, thank you so much for hanging out with me today.

Next week, we're going to have another guest interview and I think you're going to enjoy it immensely. If you're not a member of the multi threaded income discord, you should really do that today. Go to mti. to slash discord and let's chat about taking time off work. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. See y'all next time.