I decided to give Separation Season a try this year.
What the heck is that? I’ll explain …
I first heard the term from Dan Martell, who succinctly describes it as “the time of the year when everyone takes their foot off the gas, and you keep pushing” – but it seems like it might have been Ed Mylett who coined the phrase.
For me, it was less about leaving my supposed rivals in the dust, and more about wanting to maximize an unprecedented 2.5 week span (counting some vacation I needed to take) when my calendar wouldn’t be full.
Being a “big data” nerd, I track all my time anyway. Analyzing the 18 days of “Separation Season” (December 17 to January 3) against the preceding two weeks (weekends included) yielded some interesting results:
I spent less time on work (6h/day across various streams, vs 8.3h/day pre-holidays) but tripled the proportion of “deep work” I did
Though I always spend a lot of time on self-improvement, I stepped it up over the past couple weeks (1.7 hours/day – 30% more than usual), and completed 3 fantastic online courses as well as finishing 4 great books
I finally carved out time for a couple of neglected hobbies, managing to find 21 hours in Separation Season vs. a grand total of 1 hour in the first part of December
This isn’t meant to be a brag post; I’ve tried and failed at these kinds of efforts before, and didn’t have super high hopes going in.
What worked this time around was having a solid plan going into each day, and a set number of small but meaningful goals that I could fairly easily reach with a modicum of focused effort. Nothing earth-shattering here, but leagues better than my previous approach of “I really should spend some time on ABC today” – the only output that ever produced was guilt.
What’s your approach to the holidays? Do you prefer to disconnect completely and recharge, or keep grinding?