Let your life breathe (and your company too)

How the art of slowing down might help you arrive faster.

10 Jul 2025 — 5 min read

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Lying fallow

My family and I were driving through the French countryside yesterday when we noticed a beautiful purple-hued plant flourishing in a roadside field. “What is that?” my son asked from the backseat.

As we took a closer look, we noticed it was not a crop at all. Rather, it was a nourishing flower planted in the field to help restore nutrients during a season the field was lying fallow.

As I explained this to my son, he asked what fallow meant. Which got me thinking about what we were doing in Europe in the first place—and how important seasons of slow are to all humans and organizations.

My family has taken to spending summers in France. Partly to reconnect with our European heritage. But mostly to provide a counterbalance to the busier lives we lead in Los Angeles, the rest of the year.

Our time in Europe each summer has come to mark a period of slowing down. We reconnect with one another. We invite our closest friends to come and stay with us for a week or two. We swim in the chilly Brittany sea, linger over plates of fresh, cheap oysters, and bike almost everywhere we go.

I recently read a quote I liked:

With humans, and most devices, when stuck—unplug and allow to reset.

This is our time to unplug and reset.

Companies, being made up of humans, have this same need. Not to summer in France, perhaps, but to have a cadence. A rhythm. A time to produce, and a time to lie fallow.

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When there isn’t time for slow

I remember in my earliest years as a founder and CEO feeling pressure to get the most out of my team at all times. I would cringe when a team member wanted to take a vacation. We were too busy for team offsites. We didn’t slow down to plan beyond the next sprint.

With hindsight, I can see:

My team was exhausted most of the time
We lacked clear vision and conviction about what we were doing long-term
While we spent a lot of hours at the office, we often missed an available straighter line to where we wanted to go

As a species, we are not meant to work the way many of us do.

As leaders, we can resist this awareness. Or we can embrace it.

We can embrace that we—as individuals—need time to reset, think, rest. Time to metabolize the experiences and learnings from our busier seasons.

We can embrace that our organizations need periods within the year to lie fallow as well.

We can build into our years periods where we slow down, get out of the office together, and take in the lessons of the prior quarter or two. Where we look at the path ahead and ask deeper questions:

Are we headed in the right direction?
Do we need to adjust or re-align our goals?
Are we working together the way we’d like?
What would help us be closer, work better together, or have more fun along the way?

We can also build in, for ourselves and those we lead, space to rest and recover. It is a fallacy to believe we can sprint at all times. We cannot.

Following the lessons of the Stoics—we can either resist this reality or embrace it.

To embrace it, I would suggest, is to invite our teams to be like lions. When there is a hunt on, scout the opportunity, be thoughtful in the approach, then attack. Once the hunt is over, lounge a bit on the prairie and prepare for the next hunt.

Even lions rest.

Practical tips

Want to help your team hunt like lions? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Weekly team write-ups

One of the most frequent challenges I hear about as a coach is difficulty in facilitating communication as a company grows. One of the easiest fixes I’ve seen is a weekly write-up from the team to the team. Think of it as a short, weekly magazine about the company. This can be as simple as:

What got done?
Where did we get blocked?
What did we learn (about each objective)?
What’s on deck for next week?

Rotate authorship. This helps junior team members learn to communicate thoughtfully. It also fosters cross-team awareness and collaboration.

2. Weekends off devices

In many companies, the widespread adoption of Slack on mobile has led to a damaging pattern of employees feeling compelled to respond at all hours, often out of a misguided sense of loyalty.

As leaders, we set the tone.

My preference as a CEO: weekends are device-free. If there’s an emergency, pick up the phone and call. Otherwise, Slack and email stay off.

Most of us aren’t digging ditches or responding to emergencies. We’re solving hard problems over long periods of time. That kind of work benefits from time off.

3. Quarterly off-sites

If we want our teams to digest learnings, think long-term, and set clear goals, we need to give them space to do so.

My favorite tool here: quarterly off-sites.

I like to design off-sites that bring teams through a journey arc:

How did we get here?
Where do we want to go next?
What’s in the way?

Want some ideas for how to plan better offsites? Check out my post here.

Want to have your next offsite facilitated by one of our coaches (so you can relax and simply participate)? Reach out here.

4. Summer slow-downs

Most of the world slows down in summer. The weather gets warmer. Our cities become less comfortable. Customers and investors take time off.

As a young CEO, I used to feel pressure to grind through it. Later, I embraced it. We set expectations for shorter summer weeks. We'd sprint in the spring but take half-days on Fridays in August.

5. Holiday shutdown

Similarly, I’ve come to believe it’s better to shut down fully over holiday weeks than to limp along with a partial team.

My co-founders and I realized we could stay open and see who comes in to curry favor. Or we could embrace the reality that no meaningful work is happening and give the full team a deep, complete reset.

We decided to let the field lie fallow.

Closing

The aim of all this isn’t to do less. It’s to do better. To create moments of deep reflection and reorientation so that, in our periods of effort, we move more directly toward what matters.

Yuval Harari, one of the most prolific authors of our generation, spends a third of his year on retreat. Bill Gates takes a week or two in a cabin with a stack of books.

Those might not be your rhythms, but they invite the questions: