The Power of Time Off

With only a few days left in 2009, it seems a fitting time to take a moment and reflect on this past year – but more importantly think ahead to the coming years and what we want out of them.

In a TED talk given earlier this year, Stefan Sagmeister (renowned graphic designer for his album covers, posters, and recent books on life lessons) shares his unique view about the power of time off.

One of those most intriguing parts of his talk is the idea that we spend around the first 25 years of our life focused on learning, the next 40 years are dedicated to work (and lots of it in our industry) and around 15 years towards the end of our lives are reserved for retirement.

Sagmeister not only suggests, but has put into practice the idea to cut off 5 of those retirement years and intersperse them between the working years with creative sabbaticals. Even if you don’t agree with this exact structure of taking time off (instead of a full year like Sagmeister, it could be a couple weeks, or a month or a few months), it can’t be denied that in our demanding lines of work, planning for and making the most of time off has alot of power that comes back to reward us in often unexpected ways.

We are interested to hear from those (in this post’s comments) that have taken sabbaticals and what they learned, gained, and would do differently on their next one.