I wish it were as simple as "the weather."  After 27 days in a row of rain (ok – we had sun for part of two days), the sun finally came out today.

I’ve been coming up to Alaska in the summer for about 15 years.  Amy grew up here and after we started going out together it seemed like a trip to her home state was in order.  I grew up in Texas, so after putting up with the "if you cut Alaska in half Texas would become the third largest state" jokes, I took a trip and immediately fell in love with the place. 

There are many magical things about Alaska.  Everyone here has a story.  The scale of things is unbelievable.  When the sun shines, nothing is wrong with the planet.  But my favorite is that everything here needs a power wash and I get to wear jeans anywhere I go.  We bought a house in Homer six years ago and have been coming here for about a month a year ever since.

I’ve written about my need for a periodic downshift as one way I manage the intensity level of my life.  I’m fundamentally an introvert, yet I spent much of my life in extrovert situations. Over time I reach a point where I need a break from human contact.  My month in Homer is my ultimate annual downshift.  While I’m up here I work about half time, which means a 40 hour a week schedule.  Since we don’t know many people here I end up with a remarkable amount of reading, thinking, running, and chilling out time.  We don’t have a TV – and we don’t miss it.

Over the course of the year I get tired. I get up every day at 5 am. I run 5 to 10 hours / week. I work 12 – 15 hours a day, Monday to Friday. I work on the weekends. I travel. As I get older, I’ve found I simply need some time each year to sleep until I wake up.

I want more focused time with Amy. When I die, I won’t have had enough time with her.  We take a week off together every quarter, but that’s not enough for either of us.  I want to spend more time with her and this is a way to get a lot of time together.

I periodically need to refresh / reboot my brain. I need time to think, experiment, and play with new ideas. Getting away and having a month in a totally different context does that for me.

Entertainingly, I always have plenty of deal activity that happens in July.  This year I was involved in a major financing and another transaction that should close soon.  Anyone who works with me knows I am available, but very mellow.  Ah – the magic of DSL and a cell phone.

While a month in a different context doesn’t (and can’t) work for everyone, hopefully this provides a glimpse into how it works for me and answers the question I’ve gotten over and over again this month of "what are you doing up in Homer, Alaska?"

When I was at MIT, I loved the idea of office hours.  I didn’t use them often, but when I did they were incredibly helpful to me.  When I had focused one on one time with a professor, it took some of the intimidation out of the learning experience and gave me a tight window to be open about the ideas and concepts that I was struggling with, while not worrying about being graded on that stuff.

I received a note from a blog reader recently in response to one of my work-life balance posts.  In it he said "I have kids that I like to spend time with so one thing that I do that quite a few of my peers have adopted is have office hours from 8pm-10pm.  People know they can reach me and it’s the one time I don’t mind getting "have you heard of this or that" type of emails.  Then I can get in later and leave earlier. "

I thought this was a brilliant idea.  I’ve been doing this with TechStars, although not late at night since I’m basically useless after 10pm. Instead, I schedule a block of "office hours time" once a week and get through a bunch of focused 30 minute interactions.  I’ve also got this scheduled in July while I’m at my house in Homer, AK for when I want to do phone calls; there’s a block of time every day that are the equivalent of office hours.  I’m sure I’ll periodically have other phone calls throughout the day around urgent stuff, but anything that doesn’t need to be dealt with in real time will be relegated to office hours.

When I step back and think about my work pacing, the office hours concept plays a big role.  I already schedule almost all of my phone calls and my assistant Kelly has blocks throughout the day when she knows she can do this.  Overall, most of my time is scheduled so I have specific blocks when I am "in class" (usually board meetings or meetings with companies), "office hours" (when I’m on the phone or taking blocks of short meetings such as the random meetings that I do), and "research time" (when I have time to work on exploring new stuff, writing, reading, and thinking.)

I hadn’t ever put it together that a lot of my pacing mirrors what I’d do if I was in an academic setting.  When I was at MIT, I watched my advisor Eric von Hippel have an excellent rhythm for his work.  I think I’ve unconsciously mirrored some of it, albeit with a different tempo.

I will never be as good a writer as Amy.  It’s always fun for me to read her view of a shared experience we have had.  She’s got a lovely post up titled Bella Italia about our Q2 vacation to Positano and Lake Como that includes a bunch of fun pictures include breadsticks and a scorpion.   If you want to live vicariously through us and get a sense of what one of the Q vacations is like, wander over to her blog and take a look.

During my morning routine (90 – 120 minutes of catching up on email, reading my "daily" folder in Firefox, reading my RSS feeds, and blogging) I came across Alex Iskold’s post Faster – Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future.  It was ironic to me that I read it shortly after posting my last blog about my Q1 vacation.

Alex makes the argument that constant stress is part of our current reality and that it is accelerating.  I don’t buy the argument that it is inevitable – I believe that it is a choice.  And I reject it.

If you knew me in the late 1990’s, you knew that I was always online, always on the phone, always interruptible, always available (except when on an airplane), and constantly traveling all over the place to save the world (or at least my little version of it.)  By the time we hit mid-2000 I was pushing 240 pounds, exhausted, strung out, and almost manic.  One weekend Amy told me she was "done" and when she defined that (e.g. "if you don’t change, I’m out of here") I listened.

Over the next 12 months I rewired all my patterns.  I stopped checking email before I went to bed at night.  I started taking a week off the grid every quarter.  I actually treated the weekends like weekends and had some downtime.  I started running marathons. 

2001 was a brutal year for me.  I helped wind down 10 companies that year.   There was very little about work that was fun.  At one point I was on the boards of four public companies where if you multiplied all of their stock prices together you got a smaller number (e.g. they were all sub-$1 stocks.)

While I put a huge amount of energy into the very unsatisfying work I was doing, I made sure that I carved out time for myself away from work.  I still got worn out periodically, but the stress started to melt away.

As I look back over the past decade, my intensity level hasn’t changed much since the turn of the century.  However, my stress level has changed dramatically.  I reject stress.  While it creeps up on me (and is usually an indication that I am tired and need a break), I make sure that I control (and choose) the pace of my work and life.

You can do this also – if you want to.  Start by taking small steps.  Exercise five days a week for at least thirty minutes.  Turn off your computer at 8pm and don’t look at email until you wake up in the morning.  When you eat dinner – eat – don’t try to do something else (like email) at the same time.  Go to a movie and turn your cell phone off.  Go outside and play with your kids (or your dogs.)  Decide that you aren’t so important that the world can’t wait 24 hours for you – and give yourself a short break.

Reject the inevitability of stress.

Last week, while on vacation, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Working on Vacation.  It began as follows:

The title of this post sounds like an oxymoron. But it is a fact of life for me and probably many of the people who read this blog. The idea of a ‘get away from it all’ vacation is a romantic notion that I cannot seem to achieve as much as the Gotham Gal and my kids would like me to.

Later in the post he says:

My friend Brad Feld does ‘go off the grid’ for one week a quarter every quarter. I’ve asked him how he does it and I honestly can’t see myself pulling it off. I wish I could.

Fred is referring to my quarterly vacation (which Amy and I refer to as Qx Vacation) that I first wrote about in my post Discovering Work Life Balance.  In this post, I talked about five habits, including Spend Time Away.

Spend Time Away: Amy and I take a week long vacation each quarter (which we fondly refer to as “Qx Vacation” depending on which quarter of the year it is) where we completely disappear.  No cell phone, no email, no computer, no conference calls – my assistant knows how to find me in case of an emergency; otherwise I’m completely unavailable for the week.

Fred’s post acknowledges his struggle with the concept of a complete disconnect for a week.  Coincidentally, his post appeared on the first day of a 10 day "downshift" for me.  We subsequently had a twitter exchange about it and – after pondering Fred’s post for a few days (since I’m in downshift mode, I didn’t feel any urgency to react to it), I formed some thoughts about the definition of a vacation.  I came up with five different categories.

1. Spend Time Away: This is a complete disconnect for at least a week.  I have been doing this four times a year since 2000 and view this as a key part of my existence on this planet.  It gives me a week to catch my breath, rest, spend time with Amy, explore new things, and clear my brain.  I’ve felt completely invigorated every time I’ve returned from spending time away.
2. Go Dark Weekend: When I find myself feeling burned out, I do a go dark weekend.  I turn off my computer and cell phone at 6pm on Friday night and don’t turn it back on until 5am Monday morning.  I cancel anything that is scheduled for the weekend and just do whatever I feel like doing.  This is usually a once a quarter event; occasionally more frequently depending on how busy I am.  I’m considering doing this around each of my marathon weekends also.
3. Excursion: This is what Fred was just on.  It’s a vacation to a neat new place with your immediate family and possibly some friends, but there is still structured work time.  In Fred’s case, he scheduled 90 minutes early in the morning for calls and tried to be disciplined about only checking his blackberry during "down time."  I was in Scottsdale at the Phoenician from last Friday until Tuesday for my dad’s 70th birthday – I’d put this in the same category.  I spent lots of time hanging out with my family, running, playing tennis, eating, and sleeping late, but I kept on top of my email, had a few scheduled calls, and was available for important things that came up.
4. Downshift: This is what I’m currently on.  Amy and I are at our place in Keystone for a 10 day stretch.  We’ve got plenty of friends coming and going so there’s lots of social time.  I’ve got a chunk of phone calls scheduled each day (10am to noon) but no board meetings, no in person meetings, and lots of random thinking / reading / chilling out time.  I’m completely available for important things, but I’m not initiating anything substantive this week.
5. Visit: We all know this one – it’s the infamous family trip where you go visit your parents / relatives or they come visit you.  It’s a key part of life, but you often return more tired then when you departed.

I find myself regularly taking vacations in each of these categories and realize that when the expectation of the type of vacation is set in advance (mostly with Amy, but often with other people we are with) the experience is much more satisfying and relaxing for everyone.

I’m sure there are plenty of nuances to each of these categories (or possibly different categories) – please weigh in if you disagree with my categorization or have any to add.

This rarely happens to me so when it does, I notice it.  And – in my effort to write some of my tricks about work-life balance, I thought I’d call this one out, especially since it was totally my fault.

In a board meeting last week, I had a quick reaction to something I saw and rather than say something in the moment (since my comment was off topic), I added an item to my todo list to email out a note about it. 

Rather than write an email with my specific thoughts, I wrote an email that said something like "I have some thoughts about X."  The person on the receiving end suggested that we get together quickly and discuss it.  Mistake #1 on my part – I should have simply responded with the substantive thought.

We scheduled a brief meeting for the end of the day today.  He ended up bringing two other people by to hear my "important" feedback.  I was 10 minutes late to the meeting because I was down the block from my office at a board meeting.  They sat around in my conference room for 10 minutes (mistake #2 on my part.)

When I showed up, we got right to it.  Sixty seconds later I had given them my thoughts and comment.  In a moment of self-reflection, I realized everything I had just said could be summarized in one sentence.  I made small talk for another minute so that I wouldn’t feel like 91% of their time was wasted hanging around waiting for me.  While my efficiency improved (arguably I had now I had only wasted 83% of their time if you valued the small talk), I now felt like I’d wasted 12 minutes of their lives.  We quickly said goodbye.

They were very gracious about it.  I walked back to my office and felt like a schmuck.  So I wrote this blog post (which took another 12 minutes to write and post.)  Of course, you could argue that I’m wasting even more system time by having posted this (and causing you to read it), but that’s your choice.

Presumably you get the message.  I could have saved everyone a lot of time by simply saying what was on my mind during the meeting.  I had a second – and easy – chance to do this in the email I sent after the meeting.  Eventually I got around to saying it, but only after it wasted some more time.

One of my Work-Life Balance institutions is something Amy and I call "Life Dinner."  We have a standing dinner date on the first night of every month.  Given my travel, we usually end up having this date 75% of the time; when we miss it’s my responsibility to schedule a new one shortly after the first.

Life Dinner has three key parts to it.  First, we have a pre-arranged, regular, repeating evening where we both can reflect on and talk about what is going on in our lives.  Next, we give each other a gift.  Finally, we have a fun night out and either explore a new place or enjoy one of our regular haunts.  A few times a year we will share Life Dinner with another couple, although we almost always do it alone.

This isn’t the only time we go out, but it’s a special time.  Both Amy and I are huge believers in rhythms and patterns.  Having now had Life Dinner as an institution for around eight years, it’s a great monthly touch point for our lives.  Sometimes one of us is stressed or overwhelmed with what is going on around us – Life Dinner provides a great "within 30 days" opportunity to catch this and work on it as a couple.  Other times we’ve been running hard in our own separate directions and it gives us a chance to firmly reconnect.  Sometimes everything is going great and we just talk, laugh, and gossip about what’s going on around us.  Occasionally Amy will even get me to talk about my views on politics or religion.

Part of Life Dinner is the gift.  There is no set expectation here – just that we each give the other person one.  Over the years I’ve received clothes, art, my fun skull belt that I’ve been wearing around lately, a remote control fart machine, a Range Rover, books, and an occasional surprise trip.  I’ve learned how to buy (and give) lots and lots of jewelry, art, and the occasional item of clothing (although no lingerie since I’ve never really understood it.)

As I write more about Work-Life Balance, you’ll notice that part of the magic here is that I have events – life Life Dinner – that have an appropriate periodicity.  This creates a powerful (and satisfying) base to build from.  While we’ve had a few tough Life Dinners over the years (as we’ve used them to work through things in our relationship that we had conflict over), when I look back on the 70+ evenings we’ve spent together having "Life Dinner" it’s clear that it’s incredible bedrock for our relationship.  And our lives.

I spent the weekend in Austin with my dad who has written a nice post about his experience with me.  We ate, hung out, ate some more, wandered around, saw a shitty movie, had a fantastic dinner with friends, went for a run, and enjoyed being together.  We’ve been doing this for five years.  My rules are simple – we go anywhere he wants and I pay for everything.

This weekend with my dad is one of the work-life balance things that I do on an annual basis.  I’ve got several of these that make up the rhythm of my non-work life, including the annual Feld Men’s trip, my month in Alaska during the summer with Amy, and my quarterly "total disconnect" vacations with Amy.

As I sat on the flight home and reflected on the weekend, I realize how precious the 48 hours we spend alone together once a year are.  My dad is turning 70 next month and – while he’s in great shape for a 70 year old – we both know that neither he nor I are immortal.  We occasionally discuss heavy things like this, although this year we mostly just chilled out together.

Life is a special experience.  I’m lucky I’ve gotten to spend so much time – especially as an adult – with my father.  And I’m really glad that I figured out early enough the value of creating annual rhythms to keep things in balance.

I get questions like the following on a regular basis: "I like reading your blog, and I’m amazed that you can get involved with so many things simultaneously and manage to get great results while living a balanced life. Could you talk a little about your time management techniques, and how do you prioritize your daily activities?  I’m sure many readers would appreciate a post on these."

I sat down to write a long answer to this and realized that there is a whole category of self help books on this that takes up a ridiculous amount of floor space at Borders.  I decided that rather than answer this in a blog post, I’d write another crappy time management book.

Not really.  I don’t have time for that.  Nor do I have any interest. 

Whenever I’ve written on work-life balance, I get lots of compliments and thank you emails.  I also know that some of the best blogging I’ve done are series like the term sheet series I wrote several years ago.

So – to try to answer this question, I’m going to start a work-life balance series.  I’ll periodically blog about how I get things done, keep my sanity, and enjoy almost every minute of life.  Some of it will be tools I use, some will be my philosophy, and some will just be me blathering on about something.  Hopefully some of it will be helpful.

For the wiseasses out there, I know that your answer #1 will be "stop reading blogs – they are a waste of your time."  But – I don’t buy this – I learn an enormous amount from the blogs I read (in my own special way which I’ll describe at some point soon.)  Read on – maybe you’ll learn something too.