Work-Life Balance

T Minus 30 [Days] --> Work-Life balance doesn't work.

The Super Epic-Super Pacific Road Trip is fast approaching and starts in 22 days when our adventure truck is loaded onto a car carrier.

While All-Star Shipping delivers it to California, we'll have another six days here in town to prepare.

One of the Ten-Ten-Ten objectives is ten days of travel per month, and we're taking a massive bite out of that one on this trip.

By the time we're back in North Carolina, it will have been 23 days since we slept in our bed.

Folks say, "Wow, that sounds like an epic vacation!"

Epic?

Yes, absolutely. 100%, this will be epic.

Vacation?

That's a negative, Ghost Rider.

Along the 3,260-mile return trip, we have plenty of work to do.

For Optivīv, Julia will have telemedicine calls for new patients, and we'll have our twice-weekly team meetings via Zoom.

For House Partners, the execution team will be finishing up a renovation and staging it, and I'll list the property for sale.

I'll also have either two or three client homes to be listed while we are gone.

At Lily Samson, construction will have just begun for a new tenant in one of the commercial spaces, and demolition for the bar should also be underway.

And there are a million other things. Calls, emails, and meetings to ensure incoming orders are placed, outgoing orders are delivered, and clients and customers are taken care of.

I used to strive for work-life balance.

When I did, it turned out to be a short-term cycle of living for the weekends orbiting around a long-term cycle of waiting for that next vacation.

That was OK in my ordinary life.

But Ten-Ten-Ten is about escape from the ordinary, and work-life balance won't cut it.

It requires work-like integration.

Imagine a loom where cotton and polyester are woven to create wrinkle-free fabric. It starts with two different things - cotton thread and polyester thread - but the end product is a singular fabric.

The polyester is indistinguishable from the cotton.

I can't be on "vacation" ten days per month and expect to get all of my work done, but there's nothing to stop me from doing the work while I travel.

It requires only that I treat travel days like any other.

A regular day at home looks like this:

--> Wake up early

--> Finish the most important tasks before noon

--> Eat right

--> Exercise

--> Go to bed early.

Travel days have to look the same.

Early on, we realized that we had to eat normally when traveling. Of course, that can be hard to do when you're at the mercy of hotels and restaurants.

Especially when our attitude was, "We're on vacation, so we'll eat whatever we want."

That led to gluttony, and towards the end of the trip, we'd be ready to get "back to normal."

But by switching to AirBnBs, we have a kitchen, and we don't have to get back to normal. Instead, we cook as we normally do.

That's what we'll do on this trip.

Normal.

But not only for cooking.

For everything.

--> Each day, I'll be up early. Sometimes, it will be because we have to meet a fishing guide. Others it will be because I have a meeting.

--> Each day, I'll exercise. Some days, like when we're hiking, the exercise is built in. For the others, we'll have yoga mats & kettlebells in the truck.

--> Each day, my time is blocked on my calendar so that I can get the most important things done before noon.

Like a loom, I'm weaving my "work life" and "personal life" together so that they are singular and difficult to distinguish.

I have to.

Because that's the only way Ten-Ten-Ten will ever work.