Growth Days

5min • 05 May 2024

Ever since completing my first think week last year, I was thinking about how to incorporate that intense practice in my day-to-day life. I've experimented with different ideas and eventually landed on something that I now call growth days.

What is a Growth Day?

In short, a growth day is a day focusing solely on your personal growth. It includes all the same reflection and planning exercises that you do on think weeks, but only lasts a day and is much more focused. In many ways, it's the smaller sibling of a think week.
Ideally, one would have a growth day every month.

In addition, you do those at home which drastically reduces the organisational overhead. No apartment, no travelling, no packing bags and drastically reduced costs as well. All from the convenience of my own home office space.

The goal is pretty simple. You look back at the past month, reflect your decisions and focus areas, adjust or set new goals and plan ahead for the next month.

Finally, once I'm done with the core work, I pick a single topic that I'm most interested in and deep dive into that for the rest of the day. That usually involves reading books or articles, watching videos or listening to a podcast. The goal is to explore my current interests and learn something new.

Growth Day vs. Think Week

Does that mean we don't need think weeks anymore? Not at all.

On a think week, I typically spend much more time exploring new topics, meditating and living in the moment. It's the experience itself that's valuable, not only the stuff that you get done while all by yourself. A growth day on the other hand is much more practical and pragmatic. There's a clear purpose and after just a couple of hours you go back to your day-to-day business.

For me, growth days are a great addition to think weeks and they help me tremendously to bridge the months in between those retreats, but nothing can replace the deep focus that you get from a multi-day retreat in a foreign place.

While I aim to do two think weeks per year, I try to have a growth day each and every month. That way, I don't lose sight of my mission and have a reasonable timeframe to prioritise my time.

Prerequisites

In order to get the best results out, I'd recommend to have some things already in place such as clear goals and a rough mission on where you want to get.

If you've never done that before and don't have time for a proper think week, I'd suggest you start with the wheel of life exercise to get a rough understanding of where you are and where you want to go. It doesn't take too long and can be very insightful.

In fact, it is one of my favorite tools to reflect and adjust. I fill it out every time and compare it with the previous iteration to track my progress and find potential areas of improvement.

Tips

I'm still experimenting with the perfect setup myself, but I've done a couple of growth days by now and want to share my lessons learned in three practical tips:

• Get rid of distractions: Sitting in a remote cabin somewhere in nowhere almost guarantees focus. Doing the same in a familiar environment is much harder. Make sure to get rid of all distractions before hand. No chores, no tasks, no overlapping plans. Clean your desk and/or your office space and make sure that no one will interrupt you during the day.
• Focus on one topic: I already mentioned that above. Think weeks encourage you to explore your thoughts freely and dive into any topic or interest that crosses your mind. During a growth day, we want to get things done however and therefore it's very helpful to limit the options and focus on one specific topic at a time. For example, last time I spent two hours learning about how to grow mushrooms at home.
• Don't mistake it for focus time: This is probably the biggest mistake one could make. The primary goal of a growth day is to reflect and realign your goals and projects with your mission and needs. Don't abuse it for task execution. I know how productive a full day of uninterrupted work can be, but that's not what you want for your growth days. There's of course nothing wrong with focused work, but safe that up for other days.

Conclusion

Growth days make the perfect companion to biannual think weeks. They create room for reflection and planning and help to stay on track with your mission and goals.

I'd recommend everyone to at least try it once and see if it works for you.