Heaven is a weekend or holiday working alone in my office.
No colleagues are online, customers aren’t active, meetings aren’t scheduled, messages slow to a trickle, and I have my time, my quiet, my thoughts.
I put on some music, grab a cup of coffee (or a whiskey if it’s the afternoon), and use my whiteboard, Trello board, notepad, Google Slides, Docs, Sheets, or sticky notes to work on the business instead of in the business.
2-4 hours of this is perfect. I leapfrog ahead of tasks I was previously lagging on. I accelerate from barely hanging on to the train of the present to someplace miles in front of it, scouting the route into the future.
Few things feel better, and I’m reminded of the joy that comes in the toil set before mankind. I know the word “toil” sounds glib for a desk job. But I don’t take it lightly. Toil is every bit as real at a desk than behind a shovel.
When we owned some acreage and (I wasn’t behind on office work), I felt the same about farm work weekends. It’s not the nature of the toil, but the process of doing it alone, unbothered, on my own time, in my own way, at my own pace and with room to think. The act of clearing the to do list and plotting the next phase.