I sort of took a Q1 Vacation last week. 2021 didn’t really feel like it started for me until January 21st. Yeah, I took a company public on January 4th, but then January 6th happened. It was a cold, dark, and anxious stretch where January felt like it had about 51 days in it. Then I was deep in SPACland and lots of deals and financings. I definitely had some “I just need to get to March 26th, and then I get a break” in my head. ...
Every quarter I try to take a week completely off the grid. It’s a cold reboot for me, not simply a Ctrl-Alt-Del type thing. I started doing this in 2000 and it took me about four years to learn how to just turn off the switch completely for a week and then turn it back on. Last Saturday evening I turned it off and turned it back on yesterday morning. ...
I took an off the grid vacation last week. I needed it as I was pretty fried feeling on May 15th when I checked out. Amy and I went … nowhere. We stayed at home. I slept late each day. I exercised. I read . I napped. We finished watching Breaking Bad. I played with my Glowforge and made a bunch of Ear Savers. I wrote a little, but not too much, on my next book (The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors.) ...
Amy and I didn’t feel like taking a Christmas or New Year’s vacation this year so we just hung around Boulder, worked, and did our thing. We then decamped to Mexico last week for warmth, sun, beach, and books. News flash: there are a lot fewer people at a fancy resort in Mexico in the third week of January. It was a good reading week. How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success : We don’t have kids, but a friend recommended this. I decided to read it to see if any of it applied to being an investor or board member in a company. Yup – a bunch of it was spot on. After reading it, I’m still glad I don’t have kids. ...
Amy and I took our Q219 Vacation in Kyoto and then finished up with a few days of work in Tokyo. I had a terrible cold so I spent a lot of time in bed sleeping and reading. We wandered around some in Kyoto and saw cherry blossoms, but the food was mostly lost on me given how crummy I felt. I did, however, get a lot of reading done. So, as a return from vacation bonus, you get my reading list with some short comments. ...
I took last week off the grid for my Q318 vacation. Amy and I were originally going to Alaska to look at polar bears but canceled everything after I got sick and did a staycation in Boulder instead. I got at least 10 hours of sleep each day, did a bunch of self-care things (PT, massage, meditate), ran a few times (to the extent that 14-minute miles can be considered running), and read a half dozen books. ...
As I’m already getting lots of out of office messages for people taking this week off, I thought I’d revisit an approach to how to deal with email after a vacation. In 2011, Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital came up with what, at the time, was what I thought was the best email vacation auto-responder in the history of email . Now, I have no idea if Josh invented this, but I’m going to give him credit for it. ...
Amy and I took a much needed 10 days off in Aspen. The first five months of the year was intense for both of us. Lots of travel, work, and stuff. Not a lot of self-care, time alone, or reading. And very little running since my calf was injured. The last 10 days were lots of together time, running, reading, and sleeping. I gobbled up a bunch of books, all of them worth reading. ...
Amy and I have learned that I need a Q1 vacation earlier in Q1 (vs. waiting until the end of March). We were apart for ten days because of a trip she took to Africa, so we went to San Diego for a week. I played tennis every day for 90 minutes. I took a nap almost every afternoon. I got a couple of massages. We went and saw Black Panther, which we loved. ...
Amy and I just took a two-week vacation. We were mostly off the grid, to the extent we could be given several things we were working on together. We hid from the world, caught our breath, and regrouped. I often get asked what my rhythm is on a vacation like this. It’s simple – I have no rhythm or schedule. My days are organized around waking up when I feel like it and going to bed when I’m tired. When I look at my Fitbit sleep data, I got at least nine hours of sleep every day. My resting heart rate was 62 at the beginning of the month (down from 69 when I declared a travel moratorium) and is 57 today. ...