Do You Need a Think Week? How Bill Gates' Idea Can Work for Your Business​

Understanding the concept of a "think week"

Every 90 days, I take a short workcation for two or three days at a time. In the pre-pandemic days, this would often mean going to New York—I found the separation from my home in the UK useful, and I would also use the trips as a way to meet with clients. Since Covid, and also due to family commitments, my workcations lately have been in the UK and closer to home.

Ultimately, though, the location of a think week doesn’t really matter. The important thing is to get a change of scene from your normal place of work and living, as this helps you to see things from a new perspective (I prefer to book self-catering places because hotels can feel too similar to workspaces).

The change of venue will force you to alter your routine so that it becomes very difficult to do day-to-day work. Because if there’s one rule of a think week, it's precisely that: absolutely no routine, day-to-day work. Yep, that means no email, no meetings, no checking in.

The idea is to eliminate all the distractions that come with running a business so that you can focus on "deep work." The term, coined by Georgetown University professor and author Cal Newport, refers to those tricky tasks which require total concentration and the full engagement of the problem-solving, creative parts of the brain. It’s deep work that often results in that magic sense of "flow" and sparks truly innovative ideas.

Making the most of a think week/workcation

I always begin a think week by reviewing the previous 90 days to find out what worked and what didn't. For me, this involves looking at lots of stats to see if what we've rolled out in the last quarter had an impact or not.

Next, I review what we need to fix or improve in the business. Before I go on my workcation, I normally write a list, which I might add to once I’ve looked at the data. Then, I work through each challenge area, put a priority order on it, and delve deeper into the high-priority items to better understand them.

Finally, I make a plan for what I want to do about challenges over the next 90 days and come up with realistic actions to take.

Giving myself quiet, uninterrupted time and space to do this four times a year has had an enormous impact on my company. Almost every success we've had has been a result of this process—from increasing revenue retention by 3% to successfully adding 15 people to our team last year.

There have also been many personal benefits. Taking regular think weeks has been a great way to keep me excited about my work and help me maintain a growth mentality. I’ve run my business for 15 years, and after that length of time, it could be easy to coast. Instead, my workcations help ensure I’m always setting new challenges, looking ahead, and staying agile. They also give me a moment to reflect on what we’ve accomplished.

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Take active control of your time

I have no doubts about why taking a regular think week or workcation is so successful. Working in your business is not the same as working on your business—it's so easy to get swept up in the daily running of a business. The former can easily overshadow the latter unless you carve out time for it.

However, if you’re not able to spend a week in a cabin like Bill Gates or three days in an Airbnb, there are simple ways to incorporate more time for deep work into your daily routine. For example, allocating just one hour a day to check your inbox and reply to emails, and switching off notifications on your desktop, are both good ways to limit distractions.

Another way to add time to your day is to cut back on meetings. According to the Harvard Business Review, 71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient, and 64% say they come at the expense of deep thinking.

Constant meetings are a colossal drain on efficiency if there’s no time to take action on anything because you’re either always on a call or preparing for the next one. You might consider banning meetings to no more than one or two days of the week. Consider a recent survey, which found that productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%.

No matter what method you choose to eliminate distractions, the common theme is taking active control over your time and putting boundaries in place. It’s these conditions that allow productivity to thrive.