Blog Summer Holidays

Photo Credit: mayrpamintuan via Compfight cc

I’m going to be taking a short break from blogging. Just 2 weeks, but I wanted to let you know because I’ve posted a new article every working day since just before Microsoft Ignite – so I didn’t want you to think I’d suddenly stopped!

I’m going to be doing something a bit different during my down time this year. Usually the plan is that we (my wife and I) will visit somewhere, and before we go, will research the heck out of it, make a plan, and generally try and see as much as possible whilst we’re there. This is undoubtedly a brilliant way to visit a place, and means that we get the most our of our time there. The only downside is that we come back and go back to work, feeling like we need a holiday! 🙂

This time however we’ve both realised we’re in need of some downtime, and consequently have booked 2 weeks on a small island in the sun, with no particular plans. I’m sure we’ll get in some diving, sports, and sightseeing, but nothing is down on paper yet. We both just need to recharge.

However… I think I can make the time even more useful, by mentally rebooting my brain. Over the past few months I’ve been listening to the 5am miracle podcast by Jeff Sanders. One of the things he does which I like the sound of is being intentional about thinking about what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it. Having some time set aside from the daily hustle will provide time to do just that, and that’s my plan.

I’m also going to take advantage of the down time to catch up on books which aren’t about technology, but which are about making better use of my time, becoming better at working out my long-term goals and turning that into actionable plans and generally doing the right thing, rather than the thing that shows up waiting to be done. I’m also going to be putting some thoughts into a new idea I’ve had and working out the next steps for that. So, in short – maybe it’s not going to be a holiday of just lying on the beach! But I’m pretty confident that if I do even half of the things I’m planning on doing then I’ll come back massively invigorated and energised!

For anyone that’s interested, this is my holiday reading list:

The Compound Effect
The 4-Hour Work Week
Linchpin
The Icarus Deception
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
The Art of Work
The One Thing

One book which was supposed to be on the list, but isn’t because I read it before I had a chance to start the holiday is 100 Days of Techstars by Dom Davis. This is a really good read. Dom is a big part of SyncNorwich (my local tech usergroup) and recently his company took part in Techstars, a startup accelerator program run in London. No-one had ever previously blogged about the Techstars experience so regularly before and Dom’s blog posts (which have been turned into this ebook) are a really interesting insight to how the process works. It’s also pretty funny!