You can't outwork the clock

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #37

One week from today, Tabbi and I board a plane for Europe.

Two weeks. Hungary first, where some of her cousins live. Then on to the Greek island of Mykonos, where we have no itinerary at all. Nothing on the schedule but my guitar, the local food, and long conversations with my wife.

When I blocked those two weeks out on my calendar, it looked strange to me. It's been a long, long time since there was a hole that big in my schedule.

I know how this can sound. When you're the one everybody counts on, walking away from your business for two weeks can look like the most irresponsible thing anyone in your seat could do. I thought that way for years.

But I was wrong.

Today I want to show you:

• The three clocks your body is already running on (one of them won a Nobel Prize)
• Why the best performers in the world rest more than everybody else
• And the one rhythm almost nobody builds

But first, let me guess how yesterday went.

It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon. You've been at it since 7. The work in front of you is the same work that felt easy this morning, but now it drags. So you pour another cup of coffee and push through, because pushing through is what got you here.

The quarter ends, and the next one starts the same afternoon. January looks just like December, only with worse weather.

Now think about how you treat everything else you own. You service the truck. You sharpen the blades. Every farmer I know rests their fields for a reason, because ground that never rests stops producing. Every field on the farm gets a season of rest, except the one who runs the place.

Maybe you've told yourself the same thing I always did... you'll rest when the work is done. The trouble is, the work is never done. There's no finish line where rest gets handed out.

You don't earn rest by finishing the work. The work runs on rest. Your body has been trying to tell you that your whole life, on three different clocks, and I can prove it.

The first clock you know. The circadian rhythm... the 24-hour cycle that runs your sleep, your body temperature, your hormones, your alertness. In 2017, three American scientists (Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael Young) won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for working out the machinery behind it. Fight that clock with short nights and it collects from you. You already knew that part.

The second clock is the one almost nobody respects. Back in 1963, a sleep researcher named Nathaniel Kleitman noticed that the roughly 90-minute cycles we ride during sleep don't stop when we wake up. All day long, your brain gives you about 90 minutes of strong focus, then asks for 15 or 20 minutes of rest. Scientists call it an ultradian rhythm. You've probably been calling it the afternoon fog.

That 3 o'clock fog was never a discipline problem... you just ran out of wave.

And here's what the best in the world do about it. When Anders Ericsson (the same researcher I mentioned when I told you about practicing my guitar) studied the top violinists at a conservatory in Berlin, he found they practiced in sessions of 60 to 90 minutes and rarely more than four hours a day. They napped between sessions, and they slept about an hour more each night than the average players. The best in the world out-rested everybody else, and it's part of why they were the best.

The third clock is the reason I'm writing this letter a week before I leave. Science has a word for any rhythm longer than a day: infradian. The seasons are the infradian rhythm you already trust... nobody argues with winter. The sabbath is another one, a designed week of work and rest that's been field-tested for a few thousand years. The old law even rested the fields themselves every seventh year.

But nobody ever found a season in the human body, and that's my point. The season is the one you have to build yourself.

Here's how I'm learning to work with all three instead of against them.

Ride the wave. Work in blocks of 60 to 90 minutes, then take a real break when the trough shows up. A walk outside counts. Scrolling your phone doesn't... that's just different work.

Guard the edges of the day. The 24-hour clock doesn't negotiate. Protect your sleep the way you'd protect a client meeting, and give the workday a hard stop.

Build your season. In our business we run twelve-week sprints, an idea built out well in the book The 12 Week Year. Twelve weeks of focused work, then a thirteenth week for an after-action review: what worked, what didn't, and what we're changing. And then, before the next sprint starts, actual rest. I'm faithful about the review. The rest is the part I've been skipping.

Every once in a while, the season needs to be longer than a week. The two weeks on my calendar are that longer season.

I'll be straight with you about one more thing. The laptop is coming with me. I don't yet have a second-in-command I can hand the whole operation to, so I'll be working a little behind the scenes while my team takes care of our clients. Maybe you're in the same spot... the business still needs you, even on the other side of an ocean.

But the rhythm will be different, and that's the point. Time in a new place. Time with Tabbi and her family. Time with my guitar and whatever the cooks on Mykonos are proud of that day. Time with God. Two weeks built for being instead of doing.

P.S. The guitar’s coming too. I’m not good (yet), but a Greek island with no itinerary sounds like the right practice room. If an idea for a letter shows up somewhere between the cousins in Hungary and the water in Mykonos, I’ll scratch it in a notebook and let it wait. The next two letters are already written. Even the newsletter gets a thirteenth week.

"Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the
plowing season and harvest you must rest." (Exodus 34:21)

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #36
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #35

You might also find these interesting:

🔎 The "First Impression Excellence" Prompt
🔎 Client Value Journey: Stage 6 – Ascend

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...