🌲 Feeling overwhelmed? Try a Personal Retreat.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by everything you have to do?

I know I do.

That feeling is usually accompanied by internal pressure to keep grinding because there’s no way it will all get done otherwise.

Unfortunately, this self-sabotaging behavior means that longer you stay in this cycle, the more overwhelmed you become.

What we really need to do is take a break.

In the moment, our judgment is clouded. We can’t see things right. And any decisions we make in this state are likely detrimental in the long-run.

Now let’s extrapolate that feeling of overwhelm over a period of weeks and months. The longer timeframe means you probably have some ups and downs, but the overall result is the same even if we call it something different:

I’m just so busy.

Business is often the result of a lack of clear direction. We don’t know what really moves the needle, so we try to do it all.

We need to pause and get some clarity. Keith Cunningham puts it brilliantly in his book, The Road Less Stupid:

Back when he was CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates used to do what he called “Think Weeks.” He’d go to a cabin in the woods to get away from the day-to-day and just think about the future of the business (this is actually where the idea for Internet Explorer came from).

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I’ve adapted that concept for my Personal Retreat framework. Every 90 days, I get away for at least 24 hours to reflection the last quarter and think about the direction my life (and our family) is headed.

Every single time, I come back with clarity on what’s important and a heightened sense of motivation.

Here’s the exact process I follow:

• Review my journal entries (60m) – I review my journal entries from the past 90 days as well as the charts from the Daily Question in Obsidian. This helps me recall some of the significant things that happened and helps me see general trends in my thinking.
• Review my LifeTheme and core values (30m) – A LifeTheme is a personal mission statement (I have a whole email course on this available here.) I spend a little bit of time to make sure that my LifeTheme and my personal core values still resonate.
• Fill out the Wheel of Life (60m) – The wheel of life is an exercise where you rate your current happiness in the different areas of your life on a scale from 1-10. When you view the results visually, it gives you a polar area chart that is always enlightening. I always pick the lowest area to address in the next 90 days.
• Review my ideal future (30m) – I have a description of my ideal future that I revisit to make sure that the details are still resonating.
• Retrospective, Part 1 (60m) – The first part of the Retrospective is reflecting on the last quarter and identifying what went well, what I accomplished, and what could have gone better.
• Retrospective, Part 2 (120m) – After a short break, I come back and spend a couple of hours thinking about 3 key questions: what should I start doing, what should I stop doing, and what should I keep doing. This is where the magic happens, IF you stay on these questions long enough.
• Identify my goals (60m) – I condense everything I’ve written so far into a couple of goals for the next 90 days. Once I have y goals (projects), I break them down into weekly habits that will move the needle for the outcomes I want to create.
• Review/Revise My Perfect Week (60m) – I keep a rough time block plan for what my ideal looks like. My weekly plan never follows this perfectly, but the closer I can get to this the happier I am.

I do all of this in Obsidian (of course), and I recently recorded a video walking through the entire process.

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​In the video, I actually share the results from my last Personal Retreat. It’s kinda hard to communicate the value of the retreat by redacting things, so I get pretty vulnerable and share a lot of personal stuff here. If you watch the video, please be nice! 😉

If you’ve never tried it before, I encourage you to plan your own Personal Retreat. And if you decide to do it in Obsidian, you can download my Personal Retreat template file here.

— Mike

P.S. As Obsidian University grows, you’ll likely see an uptick in Obsidian-related emails. If Obsidian isn’t your jam and you’d prefer to not get these, click here to save your preferences.