Routines get a bad rap. Sure, negative routines may leave us in a mundane rut, but routines can be good for us too. The best routines create a sense of comfort and a sense of security.
If you think about it, routines and rituals are not so different. They both involve repeated action, but there’s something about the intentionality behind the word “ritual” that frees it from the banality of our day-to-day lives.
For me, my Getaway always starts with the same ritual. I pull up to my cabin, unload the car (usually with just one backpack), open the door, put my phone in the lockbox, and breathe a sigh of relief. Then I kick off my shoes, make a cup of coffee, and dive into the reading that always seems to escape me in the city.
Everyone seems to have their own ritual at Getaway, and I love reading how you spend time. Some of my favorites from this month include:
“I haven’t roasted a marshmallow since I was a kid. Just the taste of roasted marshmallows took me back to summer camping trips with my family. Although we were sad to go after just one night, we left feeling completely refreshed.” – Scott S., Getaway Boston
“We had an amazing time playing Yahtzee, reading, taking walks, building fires, cooking, chatting, sleeping, and hiking. It was an amazing opportunity to connect with each other and disconnect from all the pressure and stress in everyday life.” – Sasha B., Getaway DC
We made this video to celebrate the many routines, rituals, and practices at Getaway, whether they be by ourselves, with a good book, with a loved one, or with a four-legged friend.
Here’s to building rituals that serve us, and finding comfort in connection to nature and each other.
It seems like we’re all struggling to achieve “work-life balance.” Our inboxes are invading our evenings and our work is overwhelming our weekends. Only 39% of Americans use all of their vacation time. 6 in 7 children see their parents bringing their work stress home. A third of couples argue over balancing the time needed for work versus quality time together.
We can figure out how to conquer this crisis by exploring its beginnings. The Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that graphs the frequency of words and phrases used in books across time. It is a useful way to track how certain trends have come and gone over time. As you can see in the Ngram for “work-life balance,” the phrase came into use in the mid-1990s, had inflected upwards by the new millennium, and rocketed up through the 2000s. We are not wrong to think that this crisis of balance is specific to our time.
Ngrams get interesting when you layer on other trends. A few years before the rise of the “work-life balance” crisis comes similar trend lines for the rise of information technology: “cell phone” “email” and “internet” all came into use in the early 1990s, had inflected upwards by the end of the ‘90s, and rocketed up in the new millennium. The “work-life balance” crisis appears to be an aftershock of the digital earthquake.
The internet has not only caused the walls between work and life to come crashing down: it has also hurt our ability to work while we are at the office.
Between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, office distractions doubled from six per hour to twelve per hour. Research have shown that the typical office worker is interrupted or forced to switch tasks every three minutes and five seconds — and, worse, that these interruptions take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from. According to a study done at King’s College, London,being constantly distracted by email and text messages at work causes over twice the loss of cognitive function as smoking pot before work.
We could call this phenomenon “The Great Spillover.” Whereas our production (focused work), our coordination (interaction with others about work), and our leisure (not work)used to be relatively contained, they now spill over onto each other. We coordinate and have leisure during production hours (think: having a co-worker pop in to chat or catch yourself watching videos when you should be planning a project). We produce and have leisure during coordination hours (think: precious meeting time spent thinking about questions for the first time or in distracted chit-chat instead of efficiently discussing proposals prepared beforehand). And worst of all, we coordinateand produce during leisure hours (think: emailing during dinner or doing conference calls on vacation).
As we let The Great Spillover happen to us, we think we are squeezing more out of our days: more emails, more fun videos, more updates, more connection, more progress on our projects. But in reality, we are struggling with everything. The Great Spillover makes us bad at production, because we never have sustained, uninterrupted time for deep thought and deep work. It makes us bad at coordination, because we never give people or topics our full attention and start to negatively view co-workers as “the people that interrupt my production and leisure.” And finally, it makes us bad at leisure, because we never have a chance to truly escape and rejuvenate. Forget work-life balance: The Great Spillover is ruining both work and life.
To save work and life in the internet age, we need to combat The Great Spillover by again separating, optimizing and balancing production, coordination, and leisure.
Most importantly, we need to fortify our leisure — nights, weekends and vacations — against the invasion of work and technology. 1 in 5 Americans say they “never fully relax” on vacation. That’s why we need to make sure we find time for technology-free leisure that truly gets us away from our daily routines. We must do more than just take time off: we must mindfully get away from our daily grind so can we achieve that outside, holistic perspective on our daily lives that deep rest can bring. This not only leads to joy duringour leisure time: it also helps us do better during work hours. Research has shown that people are more motivated to achieve their work goals after a vacation.
Second, we need to fortify our production — hours for deep focus and work — against interruptions by co-workers and other commitments. As famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has shown, our “optimal experience” — what he calls flow — only comes when we are uninterrupted and fully immersed in energized focus and full involvement in an activity. The writer Cal Newport calls it “Deep Work,” the distraction-free concentration that “push[es] your cognitive capabilities to their limit,” which he contrasts to the “Shallow Work” of “noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks” that are performed while distracted and “tend not to create much new value in the world.” To achieve states of flow and Deep Work more often, we need to proactively schedule days uninterrupted by meetings and hours uninterrupted by emails or co-workers. In addition to granting vacation days, employers need to grant “production days,” where we are empowered to spend the entire day immersed in deep work to make serious progress on a project.
If we fortify deep leisure and deep production against interruption, our coordination will become healthier. When emails, meetings, and co-worker questions are cordoned off into specific parts of the day, we can give our full attention to them, rather than having them compete with our leisure and production. We cease to associate each other with the negative feelings of being interrupted. We move away from triaging each other’s needs and towards deeply engaging with each other’s needs.
Indeed, by separating production, coordination and leisure, we can save them from each other and achieve the balance needed to thrive in our over-connected age.
I’m no stranger to winter. I grew up in Minnesota, a part of the country famous (or maybe infamous) for its frigid, snowbound winters, and I’ve spent most of my adult life in the Northeast, land of the (similarly infamous!) nor’easter. There are plenty of things I love about this season: the first snowfall, glittering frost patterns on windows, Christmas sweaters, hot drinks, cozy time with family and friends.
But there’s always a point in mid-winter when I hit a wall, and that time is right around now. The early charm of the season has worn off, but we still have a few cold, gray months to get through before spring. This is when I think of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s famous line: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Yes, winter can be a slog, but what can we do? We have to slog right on through it.
Like a lot of people, I got sick at the start of this month and spent a few days in bed. Being sick is rarely fun, but I’ve found there is pleasure in giving myself over to the rest my body needs, instead of trying to fight it or work through it. I logged out of email, pulled on some blankets, and indulged in unlimited, guilt-free TV. As a kid, whenever I had to stay home sick from school, my parents would let me watch “The Price is Right”—a treat that felt so special I almost looked forward to getting sick. This time around, I binged the newest seasons of “Search Party” and “Queer Eye,” along with Adam McKay’s latest farce Don’t Look Up. Did I feel bad about lying around watching hours and hours of TV? I did not!
If there’s ever been a time to cut yourself some slack, that time is now. Winter is tough, so it’s more important than ever to make space for things that feel good. Since I’ve gotten back on my feet, I’ve been browsing for beach clothes online, and making plans for summer trips. Sure, it’s good to “live in the moment,” but when the specific moment we’re living in is freezing and bleak, there’s nothing wrong with casting our imaginations forward to a warmer, sunnier time.
A friend recently told me that the thing she loves most about winter is that it is, in her estimation, the worst season. She spends the second half of fall dreading winter’s arrival, but once she’s in it, she can take comfort knowing it won’t come around again for three more seasons. Meanwhile the earth keeps spinning. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, every day is a little bit longer and a little bit brighter than the day before. Take courage, friends. We’ll get there.
Right now, we’re experiencing a collective first. There’s no baseline to reference, no simple choices, and no clear answers. Our starting point, as always, is to listen to our guests. What we’ve heard is that being home isn’t simple, or possible, for everyone, and there’s a strong need and desire for Getaway. Above is one of the many guest reflections that has resonated during this time.
We respect the severity of the situation. That’s why we’ve been working day and night to make sure Getaway is safe for our dedicated guests, our team, and the local communities that have welcomed us over the years. We’ve chosen to remain open, serving those that choose to stay with us and keeping our hard working Outpost teams employed. We’re navigating this one day at a time to ensure we’re working with the most-up-to-date information.
If you can safely make it to an Outpost, we want to be a resource to you—not just as a physical, naturally remote space, but also as a reprieve that brings fresh air and benefits for your spiritual and emotional wellbeing. A private, solitary experience in nature is the very DNA of Getaway, and that will never change.
We are confident that we can still deliver the value of Getaway, while providing a safe experience for our guests, our team, and the surrounding neighbors. By design, there are no communal spaces at our Outposts; our guests self check-in without a front desk, and spend their entire stay at their private cabin 50’-150’ away from all other cabins. We’ve implemented more stringent cleaning procedures and are practicing social distancing.
As the founder of Getaway, I don’t take any decision that affects the health and safety of our guests, team, and neighbors lightly. Here are a few more guest reflections that remain with me:
“I’m a respiratory therapist in Atlanta and last night was my only night off for 19 days. It was amazing to get out of the city away from everything and relax for a night so thank you very much!”
“I booked my Getaway abruptly with a strong desire to disconnect and recenter in the midst of chaos. It was so helpful to my mental health given how stressful everything is right now.”
“During this extremely stressful time, it was nice to get away with someone I love and not worry as much about everything crazy going on in the world. An amazing two days away from the world.”
“At this heightened level of anxiety, having that time away was particularly special and a needed getaway – in every sense of the word.”
Please know that our entire team is working hard to be as thoughtful, thorough, and responsible as possible in the midst of an ever-changing situation. I welcome your thoughts, questions, and concerns. You can reach me at [email protected] anytime.
Last summer, the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a national reckoning with the persistent violence of racism in America. Protesters took to the streets in cities and towns across the country and around the world to demand racial justice, and Getaway stood in solidarity with those protests and the Movement for Black Lives.
In order to back up our values with actions, in June 2020 Getaway created a program to uplift and support our Black community the way we know best: by providing rest and access to nature. In partnership with Rachel Cargle, The Nellie Mae Education Foundation, and Miir, we launched A Year of Rest and gifted 365 Getaways to Black activists and community organizers, in keeping with our core values that rest is a right, and nature is for everyone. A year later, I’m thrilled to say that Getaway has provided 365 extraordinary individuals with nights of rest at Getaway’s cabins: doctors fighting injustice in the healthcare system; teachers connecting their students with diverse authors; gun violence prevention activists; interdisciplinary artists uplifting their communities’ stories; and so many more. We renewed A Year of Rest for a second year, with plans to keep it going long-term.
As we move into A Year of Rest 2.0, I’m painfully aware that the struggle for justice is far from over. Structural racism still pervades American social, cultural, and economic life. Simply existing as a Black person in this country can take a significant toll on mental and physical wellbeing. In his recent Washington Post op-ed “Being Black in America Is Exhausting,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart describes the “mental calculus” he takes to try and keep himself safe: never running in public, never pulling out his keys in public (someone might mistake them for a knife), never walking directly behind someone. He writes, “No matter our gender, age or socioeconomic status, we are viewed as threats. As a result, we live under siege.”
For many Black Americans, these feelings of anxiety and vulnerability are intensified in outdoor spaces, which remain overwhelmingly white sixty years after the US Supreme Court ended legal segregation. (Yes, state and national parks–and hiking trails, rivers, and lakes–were segregated before that ruling.)
In spite of all this, Black activists and organizers continue working and fighting, in ways big and small, to create opportunities for the next generation while making our communities more safe and our society more just. Over the past Year of Rest, we’ve had the privilege of learning about thousands of brilliant, courageous, creative change-makers through your nominations.
As we launch our second Year of Rest, I find it helpful to remember the Black poet and activist Audre Lorde, who first described self-care as a political act. Or as Rachel Cargle would say: “Black people staying alive and well is the resistance.”
With the fall approaching, I keep hearing the phrase “return to normal.” Last fall was decidedly not “normal”: with Covid-19 still tearing through our communities six months after arriving in the US, many businesses resigned themselves to another season of remote work. A year later, as vaccines have allowed for widespread reopening, workers nationwide are being told that after Labor Day, it’s back to “business as usual”: back to the office, in-person meetings, commutes, and pre-pandemic expectations.
It seems like a particular irony that so many workplaces have chosen Labor Day for this “back to business” call. Labor Day is a holiday created by the American labor movement to celebrate the contributions and accomplishments of workers, and to honor them with a national day of rest. And after this harrowing year-plus, American workers really need rest—including the workers at Getaway, who will not be “getting back to business as usual” this Labor Day.
While the pandemic has exacerbated our stress and fatigue, and further blurred the boundaries between work and downtime, it’s not a new phenomenon. When I started Getaway back in 2015, it was in response to my own work stress and burnout. For me, the tiny cabins at our Outposts are not just a destination but a tool: a way to create physical and psychological distance from the relentless demands of the workaday world. I want our guests to enjoy the tiny cabins, but more than that, I want them to experience free time: unscheduled, unstructured, and uninterrupted. The guiding philosophy of Getaway is that building and maintaining a balanced, meaningful life requires free time—not just for rest and rejuvenation, but to foster inspiration, creativity, relationship-building, and self-determination.
I want that for Getaway’s staff, too. Our teams have been working tirelessly to keep all sides of the business running smoothly, despite everything this time has thrown at us. For Getaway to be true to its mission and vision—that free time is a right, and a ritual worth protecting—we need to practice what we preach.
Starting this Labor Day, Getaway will be celebrating “Labor Week” by shutting down business for the whole workweek. (This year, that’s September 6–10.) During that time, all Outposts will be closed, and check-ins will be paused, so that every member of the Getaway family — from our headquarters to our Outposts, full-time and part-time workers alike — can enjoy a paid week of free time. With this initiative—which we hope will become an annual tradition—we seek to honor the original spirit of Labor Day: taking pride in our work while also recognizing that our lives are about much more than our labor
While Labor Week is new for Getaway, it’s a natural continuation of our company culture. Our staff knows that they are not expected to work (including responding to emails) during their off hours. Since its inception, Getaway has provided salaried employees with 20 paid vacation days in addition to 10 national holidays—and it’s mandatory that people take that time off. We’ve also extended paid vacation and holidays to our part-time team members. Three years ago, we launched our Getaday program, granting all full-time workers an extra day off each month, bringing our total to 52 paid days off per year (not including weekends), meaning we are off 20% of “work” days — or the equivalent of working four days per week.
We haven’t gotten it all 100% right over the years— we’re a work in progress, and committed to always improving — but I’m incredibly proud of Getaway’s role as a leader when it comes to honoring and protecting our employees’ free time. Still, we’re a hospitality company, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t scary or expensive to shut down operations during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year. But to me, success isn’t just about our bottom line. It’s about leading by example. Our company exists because of the people who work here, and even Getaway needs to get away sometimes.
Note: In a perfect world, no guests would be impacted by Labor Week. For the small group of folks who’ve already booked stays during the week of September 6–10, we’re currently working to ensure that they’re rebooked for new dates that work for them. Going forward, we’ll be sure to block off Labor Week so that guests can continue booking with confidence.
I’ve always found civic engagement incredibly inspiring, and never more than over the course of the last year. In the early days of the pandemic, I witnessed the myriad ways Americans came together in the service of our country and each other, as folks got together to sew masks for frontline workers, and mutual aid groups organized to deliver groceries and medicine to vulnerable community members.
I felt that collective spirit even more powerfully this spring, when I showed up at a community center in the Bronx to get my shots of the vaccine. After a long and painful year of fear, isolation, and grief—a year in which so many of my fellow Americans and fellow humans around the world lost their lives, lost loved ones, lost livelihoods and time to Covid-19—it was an incredible relief to hold out my arm for the shot that would protect me from getting sick. Better still, once I had immunity, I knew the virus could no longer use me as a host to infect the people around me. It was a genuine thrill to do my small part to help my neighbors and my country.
Last week, I got a call from the White House asking if Getaway could help out in their effort to get 70% of Americans vaccinated by July 4. I’m trying to sound casual about this, but the truth is that never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the government of the United States reaching out to ask us for help saving American lives. Of course, I said yes, and that’s why I’m writing this: to implore you to get vaccinated if you haven’t already. If you already have, consider this a request to engage in conversations with those around you about the importance of vaccination, especially if you know any of the nearly 20 percent of Americans who’ve said they don’t want the vaccine.
Although new case numbers have dropped dramatically as millions of Americans have stepped up to get vaccinated, the number of vaccinations is also dropping. And as long as a significant percentage of people remain unvaccinated, the virus will continue infecting them and using their bodies as hosts to spread through communities across the country. Earlier this month, we surpassed 600,000 Covid deaths in the US—more victims than all of the Americans who died in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined. We might be over Covid, but Covid isn’t over us.
This is very personal to me. My closest friend has a rare autoimmune disease that makes him vulnerable to bad outcomes if he contracts Covid-19. Over the last year, he took every possible precaution, and he got vaccinated as soon as he could. Although all approved Covid vaccines are tremendously effective in protecting people with healthy immune systems, their efficacy isn’t as strong for immunocompromised people. Even after my friend completed his course of shots, his body wasn’t able to produce the antibodies he needs to protect him from Covid. This wouldn’t be a problem if everyone around him were vaccinated, since the virus can’t spread without hosts to spread through. But unless or until that happens, my friend remains at risk of contracting a potentially fatal—and now wholly preventable—infection.
I know some folks are worried about whether the Covid-19 vaccines are safe. Since I’m not a scholar of infectious diseases or vaccine science myself, I’m grateful for the many explanations about the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines written by experts who’ve dedicated their professional lives to the study of immunology, and the researchers who drew on over 200 years of global research and technological advances to develop the vaccines we needed to fight Covid-19 in 2020.
I’m in awe of the ingenuity and persistence of scientists like Dr. Kati Kariko of the University of Pennsylvania, who began her groundbreaking research on mRNA—the key component of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines—all the way back in 1989. I’m grateful for my former mentor Noubar Afeyan, who I met in 2013 when we worked together to start a short-lived social media company. At that time, Noubar was already deeply invested in another startup— a little company called Moderna.
Consider the resources, negotiations, and logistics it’s taken to develop, secure, and then distribute enough vaccine doses for everyone in our enormous, sprawling country, to make them available right now to residents of all fifty states, from urban centers to rural outposts to the houses of the homebound. (Compare this to Europe, where many people won’t be eligible for the vaccine until late summer at the earliest, and other countries around the world for which even late summer would be a welcome timeline). It’s an extraordinary gift, and all we have to do to save lives is receive it.
Thank you, be well, and let’s do what we can to keep our neighbors well, too—
When I think back to this time last year, and all the plans and intentions I had for 2020, I have to laugh—or as the old song goes, laugh to keep from crying. I was going to travel! Go to more live shows! Host dinner parties for friends! Stay offline and away from screens for whole days at a time!
Needless to say, I did pretty much none of those things. Maybe you also fell short of your 2020 goals. Maybe you also found yourself eating cereal for dinner some nights, binge-watching TV instead of reading, doom-scrolling instead of meditating, and getting screen-time reports revealing you’d somehow managed to spend more time on your phone than there are hours in the day.
To that, I can only say—and I mean this earnestly—congratulations! Because here you are, awake and alive. Whether or not you feel like you’re thriving, you’re surviving. And in a year of so much loss, that’s not nothing—it’s actually everything. For whatever else you’ve done or not done this year, you’ve achieved the goal that matters most: simply getting through it, one uncertain day at a time.
As we head into the new year, I find myself thinking more about the idea of balance. Ever since my friend Pete Davis and I founded Getaway in 2015, “finding balance” has been our primary mission, the central value around which we built the company. We’ve often talked about balance in terms of unplugging from digital devices and creating firm boundaries between work and non-work life. I still believe in these values. But what does it mean to “balance your digital life” in a pandemic, when our screens have become the primary vehicles for interacting with loved ones? What does it mean to “balance your work life” when—for those of us fortunate enough to work remotely—our offices have moved into our homes?
“Balance” means something different for every person, and after this year, it’s clearer to me than ever that it’s a fluid state, always shifting in relation to our own changing needs and desires. It isn’t just about setting limits and boundaries—putting away your phone, logging out of email after 6pm, having no-work weekends. It’s also (perhaps more importantly) about making dedicated space in your life for the things that bring you joy and comfort, whatever those may be.
Over the last year, many of you have sought out that space as guests at our Outposts, whether you visited Getaway for the first time or have made a habit of returning to nature to reflect and recharge. I’m so grateful to all of our guests, and to our incredible team, who’ve continually adapted to changing circumstances in order to ensure the health and safety of everyone in our community. This year, we’ve opened four new Outposts, planted over 25,000 trees, and dedicated 365 nights of rest to folks fighting for change in our country.
As painful and difficult as this year has been, I’m proud of the work we’ve done, and I’m excited for what’s to come in the new year, including—let’s be honest!—the vaccine that will enable us to gather safely again. Until then, stay safe, and be well.
