You take the whole of August off?!

The above question is usually posed with a mix of surprise, fear and confusion.

Our long-standing clients know that I take August off, as do friends and family, it is a discipline that I have been using for the last five years or so, because in reality August is a non-month work-wise for us and our clients. August is an opportunity to refresh before the busiest months of the legal year, which for us typically are September to December and then February  to July. The ebb and flow of working life enables the opportunity to take some time to pause,  reflect, and relax.

When I have bumped into friends and business contacts at the early season football games, down the pub or whilst out and about relaxing, the question is always the same:

“You take the whole of August off?!”

Followed by a panicked:

“You check emails though, right?”

You will have already gathered that the answer to the first question is, yes, I take the whole of August off.

The answer to the second question is no. The out of office reply is on and in the case of a genuine emergency, Mark can of course get hold of me.

The anxious facial expressions some professional contacts display at my not checking emails is often amusing.  However in 2024 I had a huge project on for a client and there were some emails exchanged in relation to that particular unique one-off project because of Court deadlines. It encroached to the tune of about 3 days in the early part of the August 2024 break.

So just as at weekends I do not check emails. Rest and recovery are crucial to performance in sport, business and life.  Thus I have a separate work phone and personal phone, meaning that the purpose of the August shutdown is to shut down, pause, reflect and relax. There are business purposes behind this and also personal objectives.

From a business point of view. It is about ensuring that I am refreshed for the busiest time of the year between my return and Christmas, which as a professional services firms, particularly law firms, come back from the summer breaks, tend to lead into the biggest projects of their financial year and therefore the most challenging projects for ourselves.

From a personal point of view, the opportunity to spend time with family, to see my wife and children a little bit more, although as young adult they want to be do their own thing more than hand out with the old guy.

August is to switch off without the distractions of working life. I also get to spend time with friends without the risk of an email, or a phone call, cropping up and distracting with the guilt that goes with clients coming first for the rest of the year.

Crucially though, what it allows me to do is to reflect on the past year and to plan for the next year. As any business owner knows, you have to plan and you have to look forward, and my time to do that is in the day or two, immediately before my return.

So why do I do it?

August is the month when most people are away and therefore business wise the least gets done from our client’s point of view anyway. Whilst the UK may have left the EU, when it comes to August we are increasingly following the French trend of an extended break, perhaps this is a reflection of our warming climate, perhaps it is a reflection of the intensity of professional life in the age of distraction with emails, instant messaging, etc, but perhaps it is also a reflection of the post-Covid  lessons learned from the pandemic and lockdown.

The first two to three weeks for me are a complete chance to decompress.

I have focused in those two or three weeks over the course of the last five years, and particularly this year, on doing exactly what work psychologists tell you to do on holiday: I have not thought about work at all.

My thinking on this stems from a conversation I had with a friend and professional contact who has long taken August off in about 2018-19 over a beer. My thinking though personally developed when I revisited Stoic philosophy during the course of the pandemic. One of the key lessons of the Stoics is creating mental space between a stimulus and a response to gain clarity. This helps avoid a reflex response which might be suboptimal and it helps avoid negativity. It also helps to focus on what is important.

Somebody said to me over the weekend, will you be doing one of your blogs about your thoughts from the Greek islands as the kids go back to school? My kids are no longer at school, unless we are counting university. But this year, I did not head to a Greek island. I headed to London (where I work, probably 25% to 30% of the time) for an Oasis gig at Wembley with friends and my wife, and then we headed to the coast of Snowdonia, where we walked beaches and lakes rather than the busier hills. As always, I have read numerous books mixing high performance, management history and fiction. So my answer on Saturday was, it is not thoughts from a Greek island, but it is about the importance of pausing, reflecting and relaxing for the benefit of the business and the benefit of clients. It just also happens to benefit me and my family.

Interestingly, only once I am relaxed and refreshed, with the urge to get back to working life do I start to plan from a personal objective and business objectives for the year ahead. The opportunity to have read books without distraction for weeks on end and walked miles on end with time and space to think steers the year ahead.

This year I have been reflecting on the lessons of some of the world’s most successful professional services businesses, on high performance, on key strategies and key performance indicators, and of course, enhancing explanations and services. In other words, without working, I have focused on personal and professional development and read widely, and given myself the time and space to think about how to apply concepts that are familiar but had been forgotten or which are new in developing and which need to be understood to be applied.

So what does all this mean in terms of lessons learnt this August?

Oasis are really amazing live, each of the 25 songs they played, I and everybody else in Wembley seem to know every single word to, and the atmosphere was outstanding.

The cocktails at the Ritz the night before with friends was a summer highlight for my wife and I, because it is such an out of the ordinary thing to do.

My love of walking is always enhanced by Snowdonia, but it has been particularly beautiful this summer.

My key work and personal takeaways and objectives are though, as follows:

1. Do less, this is a continuation of a campaign I have been on since 2022 and twice a year I reflect and try and reduce more of what I am doing. In recent years this has led to me stepping back from Chairing a Business Board in Shropshire, membership of a Local Economic Partnership Board, and stepping back from chairing a Law Society Committee or two. The focus in doing slightly less is to do everything slightly better that I totally commit to. Crucially, having spent 15 years of my professional career doing things for the good of the profession or community or society, letting others have that same opportunity seems like the right thing to do;

2. It is time to revisit our business plan, at Bennett Briegal LLP, we are doing exceptionally well and far better than we ever originally envisaged. We therefore owe it to our clients to think about what we can do better for them, and of course, Mark and I personally want to do things better for the benefit of ourselves and those we care about. A long weekend away to revisit the business plan has already been booked;

3. Artificial intelligence wise, we were early adopters for some key administrative tasks, as the tools and resources available for AI are developing though, I probably need to go and spend an hour a week CPD wise on stretching myself to get more from AI than we are already doing;

4. I am also ready to write another book, I have been fortunate enough to have three prior books published and to have contributed specialist chapters in a number of other professional works. I have not written or revised anything other than magazine articles over the last couple of years because the tank was empty, but the fuel is now back in the tank.

Thinking for a living

As specialist solicitors, advising professional service businesses, we operate in a unique space, however the privilege of thinking for a living and solving problems for a living requires regular self-reflection and reflection upon how we are exceeding the needs of clients.

For me, that is August: rest, recover and get ready for the next year.

My challenge to others in professional services is, can you truly take a break, reflect, relax, and re-energise to go again to deliver excellence to your clients?  If you can do so without an extended break, I am in awe of you. But for most of us, a week or two really probably does not cut it and we are getting by, the overwhelming lesson of the last few years and the August pause for me is that it is crucial for personal and professional reasons.

I will blog more over the next week or two about other lessons learnt so keep watching this space.

Paul