The Artist's Date or time-out is one to two hours, once a week, by yourself, some kind of experience that's fun, or that should be fun, or could be fun. It can be anything from a trip to the Rand-McNally map store to going to hear your favorite music to going to hear some music you've never heard before. Or maybe eating in an ethnic restaurant or taking a walk in a new neighborhood. Literally, anything you enjoy. First of all, the direct benefits can't be calculated in linear fashion.
Business always wants a direct and linear connection.
And the truth is, most innovation comes from completely outside what we were expecting. Take the telephone. The guy's trying to find a way to make a hearing aid, an artificial eardrum, and he invents the telephone. So when we start asking for linear payoffs, we're automatically taking ourselves out of the operation of the universe, the operation of intuition. May has said that we need periods of hard concentration and periods of quiet, periods of release.