There is a day, somewhere in August, when we stop counting the days left and start counting the days gone. That is the day holidays begin to end - well before they actually do.
What makes that shift uncomfortable is not the return itself. It is the sense that something valuable is about to be traded back: the unscheduled hours in which the mind is finally allowed to wander, connect, and occasionally arrive somewhere useful. We tend to treat this as a side effect of being on holiday, not as a resource in its own right.
The Greeks had a word for it. For both Plato and Aristotle, leisure was not the absence of activity, but freedom from the need to work merely to secure basic needs, and they treated it as a prerequisite for reaching the highest form of human flourishing. The word was scholê, and it is, fittingly, the root for our word “school”. Aristotle considered having scholê an essential part of good citizenship, with real political weight: a life spent entirely on time-consuming occupations left no room for the reflection that public life required. The claim was not that rest is just nice, but that a community without people who have time is a community that cannot think well about itself.
It is tempting to read this as an ancient luxury, unavailable to anyone with a to-do list the size of a grocery list full of deadlines. But the more useful reading is not aspirational: scholê is not about having no obligations. It is about protecting a category of time that serves no immediate output and is valuable precisely because of that.
Twice a year, Bill Gates would withdraw to a secluded cabin to read, think, and reflect on the bigger picture, away from the granular decisions of daily work. One of these retreats, 1995, produced a memo to Microsoft's executive staff that anticipated the shift toward the internet and pushed the company to build its own browser. The point is not that every leader needs a cabin. It is that reflection, at Gates' scale, is rarely left to chance. It is scheduled, protected, and treated as work, not as the absence of it.
Most organizations struggle with doing this. Thinking time survives only where the calendar leaves gaps, which increasingly means it does not survive at all. Meetings get a slot, strategy gets a slot, the questioning of one's own assumptions get whatever is left, which is usually very little. Let's face it, this is not a minor scheduling problem. When reflection is squeezed out like this, what tends to disappear first is creativity.
The organizations we take seriously on sustainability tend to understand a version of this: unlimited activity is a choice, not a law of nature, and periods of stepping back are not the opposite of performance but often its condition. Recovery seasons are required for productivity, and work best if not forced (i.e. exhaustion, or what we call “burnout”), but rather chosen.
None of this argues for taking August seriously and the other eleven months less so. It argues for the reverse: for treating the clarity that shows up on a beach in August, or in a week alone in a cabin, as information worth protecting on a Wednesday in November - deliberately, and on the calendar, rather than left to whatever time happens to remain.
Have a great and impactful week!
Researcher at Center for Responsible Business & Leadership, Católica-Lisbon SBE