Spring Break!

A week without meetings! What could be more heavenly? Like taking vacation, it introduces a mini-mental-health break into the schedule.  At Walker we’ve been looking at ways to improve the balance in our lives at the office, and one of the things that get us all down is meetings. Especially those days where you’re scheduled for meetings all day long, and find yourself at 5:30pm wondering when you are going to possibly be able to follow-up on all the emails and phone calls that accumulated while you were in meetings, never mind when you’ll be able to address all the great ideas that came up during those meetings. As the days and the meetings pile up it can get suffocating.


Enter Spring Break. The rule is that there will be no meetings scheduled for the whole week and only critically important meetings should occur. Two weeks before Spring Break we had to set up a meeting for training that would only be offered once a quarter and I thought it might be the beginning of the end of the sanctity of that week, but it ended up being the only thing scheduled. There were some impromptu discussions, but for the most part everyone honored the Break, and the result was wonderful. Things got done. People unwound. A calmer atmosphere prevailed.

And like vacation, everyone came back feeling a little more relaxed and on top of things. It was a simple gift to each other. Needless to say, Summer, Fall, and Winter Breaks have already been put into the calendar. Try it and watch your company breathe.