Hi Reader,

Here is a ten-minute exercise that will tell you something uncomfortable about yourself.

Open your calendar. Scroll the next two months. Look at what you have protected, and what you have left wide open for anyone to take.

I did it this morning and found a fortress. Blocks everywhere. No bookings. No calls. Evenings closed off. One that simply says rest days, with a start time and an end time, like a dentist appointment.

My first reaction was pride.

Then I saw it the other way around. That is not the calendar of a woman who is relaxed about rest. It is the calendar of a woman who knows she will not stop unless somebody has already decided it for her.

The two look identical from the outside. They are not the same thing, and it matters which one you are.

Most of us do not guard our time because we are good at resting. We guard it because we know exactly what we are like when we leave it open.

A team led by Ryan Grant gathered up dozens of studies this year, across nine countries, asking what actually makes time away from work do anything for you. It wasn't the length, the place, or what it cost. It was whether your head genuinely left. And the bit almost everyone skips: give yourself real time before you go, so leaving doesn't wear you out, and a day or two at the other end before you start again.

​Researchers in Germany went further, following thousands of people over years. Switching off shaped far more than mood. It showed up in how satisfied they were with their work, and with their lives taken whole. And it held for every single group they looked at. Nobody got a pass for being senior, or busy, or unusually resilient.

I have spent most of my career quietly believing I was the exception.

Almost every leader I work with believes some version of it too. They rarely say it out loud. It comes out as after this quarter, after the launch, after we get through the next thing.

Your calendar is where you find out whether any of that was ever true.

The useful part is that none of this asks you to become a different person. It asks for a calendar edit, which is a much smaller thing.

So here are two to try this week.

Option A: Do the ten minutes. Read your calendar back as though it belongs to a stranger, and ask what the pattern says about what you trust yourself to do.

Option B: Protect the coming back. Most of us guard the big thing and leave the day after it bare. Put that day in now, and give it a name that stops anyone booking over it.

I am going to try to actually use the blocks I made. Saying that out loud, to all of you, is the only enforcement mechanism I have ever found that works on me.

So which is it for you? Guarding your time, or outmaneuvering yourself?

- Megan