Or how to flow well into the rest of your year

Halcyon(adj.) — denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful.

The end of summer is a special time - hopefully filled with golden memories, but also tinged with some sadness and more than a little dread.

But I don’t think it has to be that way. What if, after a little tension of the return, we continued to grow in positive affect and satisfaction with our lives? What if we - as high-performance cognitive athletes, doing important, exciting work to improve the world while living rich lives - had grown stronger over the vacation, and returned with new energy, skills and drive that continued to level us up (in work and life) as we moved forward? What if instead it looked like this?

The research suggests that Figure 1 is the most common experience for people returning from vacation [1-4]. These studies provide some hints for extending the beneficial effects of vacation: return to work on a Thursday rather than a Monday, so you face a two-day week instead of a full one [8, as described in 3, p. 318]; return to fewer unfinished tasks (delegate while you’re away if you can) [3]; and truly relax on the weekends after your return [4]. But the research only shows how to slow the fade-out - not how to keep increasing after your return.

So sure, expecting well-being to keep climbing after your return is aspirational - but I’m going for it! In these last few years working on human flourishing within the context of MakeTimeFlow, I’ve had repeated experiences of slow incremental improvements in life satisfaction, followed by multiple (and surprising) moments when I’ve suddenly leveled up in life satisfaction. I’ve worked with a number of people I’ve seen this happen for as well. I’ll explore these in future articles.

The key to how I’m tackling this summer’s return - and flowing into the rest of a wonderful year - is doubling down on ending well and beginning again well. Yup, rituals again (like the daily rituals in the platform that have been so useful in making my days better). This one is a transition ritual (see Dai et al. [6] for how temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior).

In the system these currently live within the WRAP ritual (usually weekly planning and reflection). But as you might know if you’re signed up for the weekly goals emails, the system is also aware of the larger time transitions - months, quarters, and years - and encourages different reflections at those moments: specifically, reviewing or resetting your different becoming horizons - weekly, quarterly (the next adventure), and 5+ year (your vision).

I haven’t built the summer transition WRAP ritual yet (the above is a design for it - let me know if you’d like to have it in the platform), but here is how I’m doing it manually for now:

• close well
• land softly (aka embrace the chaos)
• begin again with a clear connection to your future best self

Close well

Start with real gratitude - for the summer, for the halcyon days. Take some time this week to actually savor what happened: the people, the places, the slow mornings.

And yes, gratitude for the work ahead too. Our brains preferentially surface the efforts and risks in front of us. Like most easily remembering what was stressful, it’s easiest for us to see what could go wrong, what will be hard, what we may dread. (Thank you, brain - you are helping us to survive. But it can make it harder for us to thrive.) So deliberately redirect yourself: not gratitude for the results you’ll achieve - too many externalities often drive the big results that matter - but for what you are going to learn, how you might be helpful, and which skills and strengths you’ll get to exercise.

And include all the recharging and rest and growth you have the capacity to do in your picture of the fall months ahead, not just the risks and the effort. I think hiking is the right metaphor for the months ahead - not a gauntlet to survive, but a hike: real climbs, yes, and also vistas, company, and time in the world.

Then close the open loops. This year, before I left, I used the new “thinking” space (aka the outliner) to create a folder called “Return well” and moved all the important undone things into it (and let go of most of the rest). This was one of the most helpful things I have done around a vacation - both in helping me stress less about leaving, and in the relief of knowing I would return well.

Land softly

Many of us (myself included until recently) make our return much worse with “the big bang” return. We demand immediate change, completing all the things - including all the things that accumulated while we were away - and guess what? That is not only super-stressful, it also more quickly erases the recharge gains you got over the vacation [2, 5].

Instead, plan for, even embrace, the chaos. Give yourself 2 weeks to get through the schedule changes, the catchup, and the initial churn before you start rating your new routines. Don’t spend energy fighting to start all the new routines you planned over the vacation - enter well, set your goal to navigate the chaos of return well, and build toward beginning an amazing end of the year. Here’s the schedule I’m using:

• This week (the last week of August): gratitude, savoring, and the “Return well” container to keep my mind clear
• The next 2 weeks: land softly, and do well with the chaos (give yourself - and everyone else returning - grace)
• September 14: you’ve built everything you need to truly begin again well, and flow into an amazing rest of your year

Two practices that make the landing much better:

1. Block your reconnect time before you return (or as soon as you return). Schedule solid time blocks for working through email and reconnecting with your team and VIPs. This is important for others, but especially for yourself - it sets realistic expectations for what you’ll actually get done that first week. Just knowing this time exists can let you stop rehearsing - or worse, checking - your inbox on the trail. In my experience it gives you back 2-3 real vacation days at the end, and greatly reduces resentful sent-from-my-vacation emails.
2. Design and protect your time - including your weekends. The research (and lived experience) is clear: high demands on return speed up the fade of your vacation gains [4]. So for the first 2 weeks, cancel or shrink what you can. Before vacation, the time after vacation looks infinite, so you may have easily given it away to lower-priority meetings. Practice ruthless prioritization for these two weeks - it’s for returning well. Protecting real time off on the weekends is also an evidence-based way to prolong the benefits of your vacation [4]. For high performers this usually means deliberately creating and defending some detachment time on the weekend - and the earlier you re-establish it after your return, the more of the summer’s gains you preserve.

Begin again

Fresh starts have real effects. Dai et al. call it the fresh start effect [6]: gym visits, goal commitments, even retirement contributions all jump after temporal landmarks - new weeks, months, birthdays and holidays. But the same research carries a warning: fresh starts are rocket fuel for starting, not for persisting. Spend that fuel on the September 1st return chaos and it’s gone!

So don’t make September 1st your new beginning. Recognize the transition, embrace the chaos, let it settle, and set your new beginning after the first 2 weeks - for me, that’s September 14 this year. That’s the day you can truly begin well.

Two things to do as you build toward that beginning:

• Plan to win the year. Yes, Q3 ends on September 30 and Q4 on December 31. But unless you have mandated reporting, those don’t have to be your lines - and with the school-year/end-of-summer transition, September 30 / October 1 won’t feel very salient anyway. Instead, define your own final quarter: September 15 to December 15. It can feel like you’re losing a month. You’re not - you’re winning December and a great end to the year. Finish early and you have a little extra time for resilience, and the chance to truly enjoy the holidays, the gatherings, the actual halcyon days (and the anticipation of them) at the other end of the year. If you don’t plan for that, you could lose it all in a haze of work deadlines dragging through the holidays.
• Give yourself the gift of a great treasure map - aka write your Q4 success story. As I started to worry about the return this summer, I took a little time and began drafting my next-adventure success story for the rest of the year: who I will have become by mid-December, what I will have learned, built and strengthened. This practice (psychologists study it as the “Best Possible Self” exercise) has a meta-analysis behind it showing significant improvements in well-being and optimism - in head-to-head studies it even outperformed the widely used gratitude exercises for lifting positive emotion [7]. And in my practice, I’ve found this compelling narrative of how I win my year to be far more motivating than any list of goals, KPIs or OKRs. Instead of a death march through all the things you hoped to tackle but didn’t start early enough, you’ll have a treasure map for what you can actually uncover and achieve in these critical final months of the year.

For the students and teachers among us

If you are a student, your starting landmark is imposed on you - but you have more control over how you judge yourself than you think. Don’t judge your new routines until the beginning of week 3. Protect your sleep first, succeed by simply navigating the chaos well, and then set a date to decide which systems will really work for you - by then your brain will be ready to choose well.

And if you’re a teacher: the strongest evidence in this whole letter belongs to you - many of the vacation studies were done on teachers [4]. It shows that your true, fully detached recovery is a powerful teaching resource, allowing you to sustain your vacation gains into the year. You may need to prepare the week before school starts, so your “embrace the chaos” window might be the week before plus the week of return. Give yourself grace to return well, take the two weeks before judging your new systems, and protect some real detachment time on the weekends - it will sustain you more than you expect.

This is how I plan to use this beautiful summer energy: not just a slower fade, but another level up.

Here’s to ending your summer well, and flowing into a great fall adventure.

Yours in flow, Narath.

References:

1. Speth, F., et al. (2023). We continue to recover through vacation! European Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000518
2. Grant, R. S., et al. (2025). I need a vacation: A meta-analysis of vacation and employee well-being. Journal of Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001262
3. Syrek, C. J., et al. (2018). All I want for Christmas is recovery. Work & Stress. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2018.1427816
4. Kühnel, J., & Sonnentag, S. (2011). How long do you benefit from vacation? Journal of Organizational Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.699
5. de Bloom, J., et al. (2010). Effects of vacation from work on health and well-being: Lots of fun, quickly gone. Work & Stress. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2010.493385
6. Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect. Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901 — and Milkman’s book How to Change (2021), chapter 1.
7. Carrillo, A., et al. (2019). Effects of the Best Possible Self intervention: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222386
8. Strauss-Blasche, G., Muhry, F., Lehofer, M., Moser, M., & Marktl, W. (2004). Time course of well-being after a three-week resort-based respite from occupational and domestic demands: Carry-over, contrast and situation effects. Journal of Leisure Research, 36(3), 293–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222216.2004.11950025

PS. Want help doing this, not just reading about it? I’ve built a first version of “The Great Return” - an AI companion skill that helps you build your Return-well list, land softly, draft your Q4 success story, and check in with you weekly through December 15. I’m developing it in public - reply “RETURN” and I’ll send it to you or grab it here​

PPS. Try my free ‘Time Diagnostic Tool’ (10 min). Get a personalized strategy for unblocking your time 👉 https://clarity.maketimeflow.com/diagnostic