Embracing "Monk Mode"

It’s 4:30 in the morning the day after Superbowl and I’m in monk mode working on my last book. I didn’t want to write another book but I needed to write this one to avoid any possible regret down the road.

Let me explain.

Pre-pandemic I was doing one of my library seminars and had just finished talking about “The Big Dip” which is my take on a typical boomer’s lifecycle. A young lady in the audience asked if I could show her what a millennial’s lifecycle looked like and I hesitated to show her because from where I was standing it didn’t looked very good at all.

I fear for our children’s future and that is why I felt the need to write a new book to clean up some unfinished business.

For those of you who are not familiar with the term monk mode it’s where a person focuses all their energies on a project and ignore pretty much everything else that could get in the way.

Monk mode puts me in a state of flow where I think about the book all the time. I think about it while swimming, while doing my 10,000 steps, while showering. or working out at the gym. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and need to write a new idea down before it escapes me.

Working on a new book consumes me it’s a state of total immersion and I can only work in monk mode for a three month period - any longer than that and I will burn out.

I prefer entering monk mode in the winter when the weather is bad outside so there is nothing pulling at me. My focus is on the work and nothing else except getting my daily two hour workout in.

When you are able to find your flow and can stay in it for a prolonged period it’s incredible how much you can achieve.

My first time in monk mode The first time I entered monk mode was back in 2016 while working on Victory Lap Retirement (VLR). I would get up around 4 in the morning excited to start writing.

When you write that early before having your first coffee you write more from the gut than the head. Thoughts at that time are so pure and they just flow. At the end of the day you are so tired that you can’t remember what you wrote.

I always smile remembering back to when I sent the first draft of VLR to our editor. She called me back about a week after receiving it and sounded a little agitated. She asked me if I knew what I had done. I responded yes, I had written a book on retirement and she said no you wrote a book on not retiring.

Hearing her say that shook me up because who in their right mind would buy a retirement book about not retiring? She asked me if I still wanted to have it published and I said yes because it felt like the right thing to do. I’m glad I did because it turned into a best seller which just proved to me that a lot of retirees felt like I did about retirement.

People like me don’t want to retire. We just need help figuring out what to do with the rest of our lives.

When monk mode ends in May, I'll be heading to Italy for three weeks of recovery (aka eating and drinking).