Quarterly rest weeks: why I take a week off every three months as a small business owner

Every quarter, I step away from my business completely for a full, paid week of deep rest. That means no client calls, email inbox, sneaky “quick tasks” or social media. I shut the whole show down for a bit.

I’ve been using this quarterly rest week system since September 2023, partly by choice and partly out of necessity.

Two big handbrakes shape the way I work: my health (including a back injury that causes chronic pain) and a neurotype that’s prone to sensory overload and burnout. I simply can’t go as hard or as fast as others.

Plus, I’m a firm believer in working to live, not the other way around.

So I turned to the permaculture design framework to build rest directly into my business rhythm and policies. Now, instead of waiting until I crash, I have structures that make regular time off automatic.

In return, I experience a positive feedback loop of more focused and productive work days, steadier health, better quality work outputs and happier clients.

Here’s the process I used to design this rest system — plus ideas to help you shape your own version.

Listening to my body and building a system for rest

Back in January 2023, I realised I hadn’t taken an extended break from my ethical digital marketing consultancy for years. With my client load packed back-to-back, my calendar was crammed full and I felt stuck on a non-stop hamster wheel.

My body was sending clear signals that this pace wasn’t sustainable. I experienced severe chronic pain flare-ups and many days of heavy fatigue.

Although I had holiday time built into my business budget, trying to take rest ad-hoc just wasn’t working — I never found the time to stop.

Realising I needed a more systemised approach, I used permaculture to design a sustainable solution that would work long-term. It bakes rest into each week and each quarter, so I don’t have to consciously create space for time off.

(Side-note: contrary to popular opinion, permaculture isn’t just about gardening. It’s actually a whole-of-life design framework that can be applied to any context to create more sustainable ways of living and working.)

These days, I work about 180 days each year — two months less than the Australian full-time norm of 240 days. That includes:

• A rest week every three months (four weeks total).
• An extra week off at Christmas.
• A four-day work week, with Fridays off (about nine extra weeks off).

I’ve chosen this cadence as it gives me a short period of much-needed recovery every week, as well as an extended period of rest and downtime each quarter.

To some extent, this does mean less output in my business. But I find that I do a lot more quality work — I prioritise quality over quantity — which leads to happier clients (and a happier me!). It’s become a key way I weave the permaculture ethic of People Care into my business.

Acknowledging the privilege behind my rest system

I also want to acknowledge the privilege embedded in this choice — I’m white, well-educated, somewhat able-bodied, self-employed and working without dependents in an industry that allows this level of flexibility. 

I know this isn’t possible for everyone.

But for those of us leading businesses, we do hold some power to choose — to create more diversity in how we structure our work and to experiment with models that make rest a non-negotiable part of our business design.

As American physiologist Dr Josephine Rathbone once said, “If we could learn how to balance rest against effort, calmness against strain, quiet against turmoil, we would assure ourselves of joy in living and psychological health for life.”

Using permaculture to design sustainable rest systems in my business

To figure out a rest structure that would suit my specific needs, context and business, I applied my Four-Step Permaculture Design Spiral framework — observe ➞ design ➞ implement ➞ iterate. 

Let’s step through the process, with examples of how you could use the same approach to create your own version of a sustainable rest system.

Step 1: Observe

Taking a step back to look at the wider picture, I realised I’m not great at spontaneously resting. I was pushing through, ignoring symptoms of pain and overload, or telling myself I’d slow down once I finished this big project, only to take on an even bigger project next.

Your turn: Notice your own patterns around work and rest. Do you overcommit and overschedule? Delay breaks? Keep an eye out for signals your body or mind may already be sending you.

Step 2: Design

Given my tendency to overwork, I turned to one of the 12 permaculture principles: ‘apply self-regulation and accept feedback’. I realised I’d been ignoring my own feedback loops — chronic pain, fatigue, sensory overload — and so I needed to design business structures that ensure healthy self-regulation by building rest in automatically, rather than relying on my willpower. An obvious starting point was to cut back from full-time to 30 hours a week.

Your turn: Consider ways your business, workday or schedule could be redesigned to protect rest automatically. Could you drop back hours, work from home more often or even just block out an hour for a proper lunch break each day? Do you need more rest daily, weekly or quarterly? What cadence would work best to restore you?

Step 3: Implement

I first tried working 30 hours across five days — shorter days, but still showing up every weekday. Yet after a few months, it became clear this wasn’t working. Even with shorter work blocks, my brain didn’t properly switch off, and my back was still suffering from so many days sitting at the computer. Plus, I still wasn’t getting any extended rest or holidays.

Your turn: When you implement your own design, start small. Experiment with one or two changes and give them a fair trial, paying close attention to what feels good versus what doesn’t.

Step 4: Iterate

Listening to my feedback loop, I reshaped my calendar to apply self-regulation in a different way. I shifted my 30-hour work week into four days, giving myself Fridays off, and introduced the quarterly rest week system for longer, uninterrupted breaks. Each full rest week is now a recurring calendar event, blocked well in advance, which helps prevent work from creeping into that dedicated downtime.

Your turn: Permaculture works best when approached as a constant process of learning and adapting. Iteration completes the cycle and returns you to the beginning again: after tweaking your structure, you go back to the “Observe” step, noticing how the changes perform. From there, you can refine your design, implement new strategies and iterate again. This makes permaculture a continuous, evolving process — a constant wheel of improvement.

Making it work: managing expectations and communicating clearly

Building rest into my business doesn’t just stop at blocking time on my calendar — it’s also about managing expectations and communicating clearly with clients and contractors.

I’m open about this policy everywhere I can: on social media, on my website (like this here blog post) and in client proposals and contracts. Anyone considering working with me knows this is my standard business policy, so there are no surprises.

Day-to-day business structures also help.

During work weeks, I don’t take unscheduled calls or respond to messages on the fly — all client interactions happen via email or in scheduled meetings. This company-wide policy prevents my phone from buzzing constantly during rest weeks, protecting my downtime.

And I actively reduce my workload by taking on fewer projects in months that coincide with rest weeks, lowering my business budget targets to match.

This helps me avoid the all-too-common trap of cramming a full workload into fewer days to “earn” time off, only to return to an overwhelming mountain of tasks afterwards. Managed well, quarterly rest weeks don’t have to look like that — but it does mean being intentional about what you say ‘yes’ to.

A fortnight before a rest week

In preparation for taking time off, I email all current clients to let them know when I’ll be unavailable, encouraging them to get in touch if anything outside our already scheduled work needs completing before I down tools.

During the rest week

Once the rest week begins, I use automations to make it clear to anyone trying to reach me that I’m offline. This includes:

• Adding an announcement bar to my website, with dates I’m offline and a link to this blog post.
• Switching on auto-responders across both my email addresses and my social media channels.
• Removing social media and email from my phone to reduce temptation, helping me hold firm boundaries.

I use Asana tasks to map all the steps above, so I can easily repeat the process every rest week without reinventing the wheel.

What I do during quarterly rest weeks (TL;DR: kinda nothing)

The lack of proper rest is like a plague in our modern society, I think. So many of us feel run ragged by busyness, guilty about taking breaks — or, worse yet, don’t even know what to do when pausing for rest.

It makes sense in a way, because we’ve been conditioned by capitalism to equate productivity with worth, making it hard to justify truly stepping back.

As Brené Brown, says: “It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol.”

So, learning to effectively rest is essentially a muscle we need to consciously retrain.

During my rest weeks, I aim for maximum downtime. That means stepping away not just from work, but from all the usual scheduled activities too: personal training at the gym, a weekly beach walk with my bestie, jazz dancing class and band practice.

The goal is to step completely outside my routine and give myself space to truly decompress.

Occasionally, I use a rest week to travel, visiting family or friends interstate or overseas. But most often, my favourite way to spend that time is at home. A plan-free stay-cation that allows me to fully rest.

Sometimes, that looks like reading silly novels, watching embarrassingly trashy TV, playing ukulele and napping often. Other times, it’s a lot of physical gardening work, tiring myself out in a completely different way.

Creating a ‘Library of Rest’

Over time, I’ve realised that rest doesn’t have to mean doing nothing at all.

We each have the opportunity to redefine rest by paying close attention to what truly feels restorative for us — and then making space for more of that, whatever it might look like.

One practice that helps me is keeping a ‘Library of Rest’: a running list of activities I can turn to depending on my energy levels:

• Low-energy rest (soothing, calming): watching TV, taking a bath with Epsom salts, reading light novels, gentle stretching, napping.
• Restorative, energy-giving rest (replenishing, active): going for a bike ride, cooking something nourishing, shovelling compost, playing ukulele, gardening.

You might like to start building your own Library of Rest by paying attention to how different kinds of rest actually feel in the moment. Notice which activities leave you feeling drained, which take the edge off and which genuinely restore your energy.

Over time, you’ll build a clearer picture of what rest looks like for you — a personal map you can return to whenever you need it most.

Because, ultimately, we’re each the manager of our own time, and it’s the most finite resource we’re given.

I’d love to see more of us recognising time as the richest form of wealth we have, and prioritising it accordingly.

The positive impact of taking a week off every three months

I experience a clear positive feedback loop from this systemised approach to rest.

On work days, I feel more focused and productive. The four-day work week also offers space and flexibility to reshuffle my workload for rest and recovery on low-energy days or when chronic pain knocks me for six.

And though I don’t plan it this way, regularly switching completely off from the ‘doing’ in my business allows me to step back, take stock of the bigger picture and course-correct or prioritise level-ups that are hard to spot when I’m neck-deep in client work.

That’s a form of ‘doing’, I suppose. But it bubbles up naturally and feels energising and freeing, like slipping into creative flow.

These seasonal pauses help me let go of the small stuff and reconnect with the deeper ‘why’ behind all of my work — a genuine desire to help accelerate our transition to a climate-positive future.

How I make quarterly rest weeks work financially

In preparation for taking a week off each quarter, I got very real about my finances. 

I drew up a full budget for both my business and personal life, and got clear on the bare minimum I needed to get by, plus growth targets that would allow me to slowly expand.

With the gross and net target figures for my business in hand, I then calculated weekly financial targets based on a 47-week work year, working a four-day week — leaving room for five weeks off: one week each quarter, plus an extra week over the busy Christmas period. Earning a little more during my working days essentially “pays” for my weeks off.

This system gives me the freedom to take time off without financial stress, and it also forces me to be intentional about which projects I take on and how I prioritise my energy.

Funnily enough, working less also often means I need less money.

That’s because I have more time to prioritise a more sustainable permaculture lifestyle: things like bartering, growing my own food, bin diving, mending, walking and op shopping. Prioritising a thriftier — and more sustainable — lifestyle has been crucial to living within my means even when working fewer hours.

These lifestyle choices all cost less than the usual consumer-driven alternatives, but they do require time and energy — precious resources that quickly run dry when we overwork.

As David Allen says: “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”

My seasonal rest weeks act as a reminder of what’s truly important to me, helping me spend my time and energy more wisely.

Examples of other businesses (with employees) implementing quarterly rest weeks

Since implementing this business system in September 2023, I’ve watched like a hawk for examples of anyone else treading a similar path — and they’re rare.

One standout is Tori Dunlap, a Seattle-based money expert and founder of Her First $110k. She offers her team a paid week off every quarter, during which the entire company shuts down. 

“We have particular rest periods baked into the company. The company kind of pauses so that we can all rest collectively — we all come back to work together and we all go off of work together,” she explained in this podcast episode.

“So a month out of the year is already off before PTO [Paid Time Off] kicks in. I am very proud to offer this. This is not common, this is not normal.”

Los Angeles-based Lacy Phillips, founder of To Be Magnetic, has also offered her team week-long breaks during Equinoxes for a reset, plus extended breaks in July and at Christmas, although her model “can fluctuate depending on our working model,” according to her team.

Nonetheless, I love that these two examples prove regular rest weeks are possible even in larger companies with multiple employees.

Elsewhere, personal trainer Jesse Lee has written about taking quarterly rest weeks in their business: “I desperately needed this multiple-day span in order to process the last few months, recover my body and my mind, and slow down enough to notice the difference between being stable and being able. I am able to work like a dog for months with minimal breaks, but that doesn’t make it stable for my body, mind and spirit.”

In the fitness world, rest or recovery weeks are often built into structured training programs. While I don’t love Jesse’s “work hard and recover harder” framing (because rest isn’t something we need to ‘earn’), I do love seeing this kind of intentional rest week structure moving beyond the gym and into the world of business.

Radical rest in a culture obsessed with busyness

Scheduling consistent deep rest into business-as-usual can feel a bit radical in a culture obsessed with busyness and productivity.

It takes conscious action and mental retraining to even feel comfortable with stillness and rest.

But the benefits are real. And the more of us who walk this path, the more diverse our working landscape becomes — and the more accessible.

Because just like biodiversity in an ecosystem, business diversity helps contribute to more sustainable ways of working for all.

Related resources

• Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey — a challenging but excellent read; flip to pages 163-169 for an insight into month-long Sabbath breaks from work and social media that the author regularly takes as a “personal, spiritual and political practice”.
• How to implement a four-day work week as a small business owner — a podcast interview diving into the structures and systems that have made it possible and sustainable for me.
• Urban permaculture in a fast-paced world — includes a discussion around financial budgeting, bartering for services and how to make the ‘business of living’ cost less so you can work less.
• How to create a business aligned with your values — using permaculture to get clear on your values, plus how to effectively apply those values to your work, scheduling, offerings and content creation.
• Digital Marketing Coaching — want a hand designing and implementing a similar system in your business, then communicating it to your customers? Let’s sit down together to map our a sustainable approach.