You Need a Deloading Week

Another Tuesday morning rolled around.

I was up at 6, threw on a jacket, and headed out for a quick walk.

Then straight into Notion for a morning review, toggling over to Superhuman for a barrage of inbound emails, and running through Hubspot for a deal check-in.

I let out a deep breath. Damn, I need a change.

Not necessarily a vacation, either. Something different entirely.

What I needed was a deloading week. A chance to give myself the cognitive breathing room to re-evaluate my direction, pace, and priorities.

Habits fascinate me because they lend perspective.

If I got rid of all my habits, the one I would refuse to drop is my morning walk.

Even on the busiest of days packed to the brim with meetings, kicking off the morning with a blue sky and crisp breeze offers a powerful reframe.

All of a sudden, I’m not stressed anymore.

I’m not worried. I’m just breathing, walking, and enjoying the sunshine.

I protect that 30 minute walk at all costs. However, I realized that I didn’t have an extended version of that morning walk on my quarterly calendar.

Last week, I finally took a deloading week. But first, I’ll walk you through what my typical day looks like.

As you can tell, it’s nothing special. Definitely not rocket science.

But, it’s a lot of work. Long hours with little time to rest.

Without cognitive breathing room baked in, I don’t have a chance to step back and think through if I’m actually heading in the right direction.

Tim Ferriss wrote about his own deloading phase a few years back.

“I feel that that the big ideas come from these periods,” he notes. “It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.”

“If you want to create or be anything lateral, bigger, better, or truly different, you need room to ask “what if?” without a conference call in 15 minutes.”

In keeping with Tim’s advice, I rescheduled the majority of my seemingly endless calls and meetings. I also prepped my core workload for that week in advance.

With this newfound freedom, I filled my schedule with a different set of activities.

This new routine only lasted 5 days — and it worked wonders.

A week-long reversion was exactly what I needed to replenish my energy levels for the coming weeks. Time spent reading, writing, and simply being in nature provided the room to think strategically about how I'm spending my time.

Importantly, deloading does not mean vacation.

If anything, last week was more difficult for me — uncomfortable even.

I had become so accustomed to flexing the same skillset that switching on different parts of my brain was hard, yet overwhelmingly necessary.

It forced me to slow down and ask the hard questions.

It also grounded me, providing a much-needed reminder that the most important and memorable parts of life reside outside of your 9 to 5, or in my case 6 to 6.

At the end of each day, the shadows lengthened and time stretched — but it didn’t fly. When you force yourself to sit in silence, you find true clarity.

For the first time in a year, I was fully coherent.

Maybe that’s what I was chasing all along.