Stop making breaks and take micro vacations
By: Markus Freise
Tags: Self Employment, Freelancing, Productivity, Entrepreneurship, Self Development

Photo by Shaojie on Unsplash

The german word for self employment is „Selbständig“ which literally translates to „self stated“ — like you are somehow setting your own status or working class. But „ständig“ can also mean „always“. And so there is the german phrase: „Selbständig arbeiten bedeutet selbst ständig zu arbeiten.“ —Losely translated into „Being self employed means working for yourself and all the time.“ With the emphasis on „working all the time.“

Usually people say this with an amused, pitiful look on their face. As if it was something bad to work. Maybe those people are not enjoying their work and can’t imagine, someone does. (Imagine me putting up a pitiful face now.)

Lately, especially since I’ve been a freelancer, I am hearing this phrase over and over again. In attempts to make me feel miserable or to joke about me being in the studio or agency from early morning to late night. My common response is a polite nod. Occasionally humble silence. But very rarely this self-pitying facial expression as if they were right and my beloved work as creative entrepreneur wasn’t something I deeply love to do.

Yes. I’m sorry — but not — to say that I really, really enjoy my work. All the time.

On the one hand, being blessed with making a living out of the things you love is a great thing. But, on the other hand, it’s also a huge problem.

What my job — mainly as a web designer and illustrator — has in common with any other job is that it draws energy. Maybe even more than other jobs sometimes do. Precisely because I like it so much and therefore do it so intensively. Around the clock. I can only assume this conclusion. But then it doesn’t matter if this is true or not.

The bottom line remains: Yes, I often run out of breath.

Having the ability to recognize this point when too much is too much early enough, before losing control and exiting the daily highway of hustle on the intersection to the wonderland of burnout, is something I’m some kind of proud of. But then wouldn’t it be better to never get to this place?

Then I never take breaks, like „normal“ people do in „normal“ jobs. Those short interruptions from work. Where you chat with colleagues. Go for a smoke. That kind of thing. Maybe because I don’t have any real colleagues. And even more so, now everyone is working from home. Maybe because I haven’t smoked for nearly two decades now. But definitely because as a creative entrepreneur, I don’t want to lose the flow once I am in this beautiful state of mind. Why would I interrupt something that is fun und precious? You also wouldn’t take a break while having sex, for example, because “I am fine for now. I’m going to get some coffee. Want some, heh? And, how did you like this new Netflix show? How is your family?”

The truth is: Working freelance often lacks the typical, involuntary interruptions people have in corporate environments where colleagues come around for a chat or short meetings that get you out of the tunnel — which the flow sometimes is. A dark long journey sucking you into and there is only one way out: Forward. This completely uninterrupted work, in connection with a job that satisfies your every cell and drives you, is an explosive mix.

How to defeat „the god of crap“ with micro vacations

Then yesterday I had a great conversation with someone who has a similar freelance set up as me and is going through the same crap. That he regularly gets to a point where the batteries are drained and the systems shut down by themselves. Though not everything is done.

Being self employed you can get into this endless cycle of euphoria and crap again and again. Now, on such sh*tty days, when there is no energy for real work left, you could simply close the door and simulate work. Typing ahead behind your wall of monitors. While you’re actually setting the social network servers on fire by doom scrolling. But what else could you do, if you don’t want to sink your life into this meaninglessness? Don’t want to waste precious time with this unnecessary, slot machine like, news feeds?

As someone who has been dealing with all aspects of productivity and creative work for years, I am constantly thinking about how to get a better balance of work and filling up the batteries. How to deal with such things on the day to day scale. Apart from weekends off hiking or sabbaticals.

Then a great idea struck me. More like a thought. A name for a concept came to my mind that was still unknown, even to me.

I called it “micro vacations.”

Though having the glimpse of this word in my mind, I didn’t have an exact idea of what this strange new thing should be like. It just felt right. Was this „micro thing“ just the next smaller unit after short vacations at some beach resort or climbing in the mountains? Maybe. That sounded good enough for me. So I decided to think it some steps further.

Then, some days later it hit me again. Coming out of a six week long mixture of headache attacks, deadlines and bad weather, the „god of crap“ rose up once more and demanded me to pay tribute to him by lackluster and whining. That was when this idea of “micro vacations” came back to mind, and I used this mental impulse that wanted me to look over the cliff down into the chasms of a dooming burnout, to define „micro vacations“ more precisely. Somehow it looked promising to keep me away from the edge.

This is what I came up with:

A micro vacation is the opposite of a break. A break is something passive, a time when you’re not doing anything. A micro vacation, on the other hand, is something active. A time when you do something consciously: You sit outside and look at the sun. You go for a walk around the block. You call your mom and ask how she’s doing. You read a chapter in your new favorite book. Or you sit down in the early morning with a cheese sandwich and a latte in the city centre and watch the hustle and bustle of the city.

Let me repeat: The essential difference between „taking a break“ and „having a micro vacation“ is to do something consciously and not letting something be consciously.

Doing so, you create a short period of time that is actively filled with a decision. Taking a break, on the other hand, you often just tear a hole in your day into which energy suckers like social media or pointless chit-chat can squeeze themselves. Because you didn’t proactively decided how to use this time.

This active part of the micro vacation makes a huge difference. It opens up the possibility for a creative person’s most important tool to unfold freely: Boredom. That time when impressions, inspirations and unsorted thoughts coalesce and become ideas. That is impossible to do if we fill every spare minute with timelines, news sites or YouTube videos.

The great German author and pop philosopher Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre wrote a very strong sentence about this at a very young age:

Standing at a street corner and doing nothing. That is power!

What he didn’t know at that time was that he had just invented the micro vacation.

My first micro vacation looked like this: I found myself at 10 in the morning. With a cheese sandwich and a latte from the sidewalk café. On the ugly, concrete Jahnplatz in Bielefeld. Watching the people in their hustle and bustle. For 10 minutes I did nothing else but watching and listening. Then, as suddenly as it started, the vacation was over.

Take that, God of crap!