Episode 53: Don't Drift Through Summer. Design It.

**Charlie Harary** (0:00)
This is Crossing the Chasm, your front row seat to how leaders think in real time. My name is Charlie Harary, RXR's Chief People and Organizational Strategy Officer, and I'm joined with RXR's CEO and leader Scott Rechler. Join us as we break down what's happening in the world and we pull out the leadership lessons behind the headlines. Scott, thanks for taking the time.

**Scott Rechler** (0:17)
It's great to be here.

**Charlie Harary** (0:18)
So we are in summer, and summer is a unique time in general in an RXR, right? You have this sense of vacation and people going and you want to get out, and the world is taking it easy, but there's still a lot of work to do, we don't slow down, and there's always this balance of how do you balance between time off, between being able to take the time for yourself and your family, but at the same time, your responsibilities and keeping the wheels turning. How do you deal with it? How do you grapple with summer?

**Scott Rechler** (0:46)
Yeah, summer is an interesting time, to your point, because everything feels like it goes down another gear, right? I have mixed feelings about that, right? On one side of me, which is the driven side, is I'm frustrated on Friday afternoons that I can't get someone on the phone, but we're trying to close the deal. I don't like that pace of change, not being there at those moments of time. So in that, what I think is important is to really identify what you really need to get done, and make sure that you're crystal clear to your team yourself, what are those priorities and how are you going to do it, so that it doesn't get lost in that summer melanzas that happens out there, right? On the other side of the coin, though, I think it's also a time where you can recharge and find ways to, I call that mind, body and soul moments of re-energizing yourself in the taking in the summer downtime. For me personally, I have a harder time when it's the longer vacations, when you disappear for an extended period of time, I find that I get a little bit more anxiety about what am I missing, what do I got to catch up on, and I can't really relax. I prefer sort of these micro long weekend type opportunities, where I can go make an analogy, it's instead of sleeping, it's taking a good nap, but you still wake up feeling re-energized, right? So I use that time to read things I wouldn't normally read during work, novels, historical fiction, history, autobiographies, things that are engaging to me, exercising, going to places I would not normally go to, see new people, new cultures. And I find that if I could do that for four or five days, I come back feeling energized. What I would say is it's incumbent upon you to make sure that you find time to re-energize yourself, right? So it's equally incumbent to be responsible for what you gotta get done. But if you burn yourself out, if you don't refuel, you're not going to be thinking clearly, you're not going to be as effective as you can be, and you're not going to be the best that you could be as a person.

**Charlie Harary** (2:44)
I wonder if many people feel this way. I wonder if people feel that when they go on longer vacations, that on paper, it looks great, the first maybe few days or whatever, and they start to feel like, what am I missing? What do I got to do? And then when they come back, getting back into work feels like they never left. And I wonder if what you're saying really is a strategy that people should think about embracing, which is everyone's got to do what they got to do. But the idea that really what you're looking for is to be refreshed. Right. And what I'm hearing you say was really a lot of activity, but activity you enjoy, activity you want to be doing. You're reading, you're going to places, you're exercising.
And I think people don't make that connection, that taking time off is really meant to pick the amount of time that you need, that you don't feel the anxiety of being gone, and you still have enough time for yourself to do things that may be a little bit different, but still give you energy so that you come back more energized.

**Scott Rechler** (3:47)
Fair point to take a couple of points on this, right? One is there's a strategy around building a vacation, right? If you just say you're taking a vacation and you're at four or five days, you don't really have a strategy of what you're going to do to make that vacation rich and rewarding. You wake up at the end of the five days and it went like that, and nothing really feels different, right? So like when I started vacation or plan a vacation, I planned it with that in mind. What do I want to do to enrich the time for me? What I want to do to get the most out of that time?