🗝️ Do you need a focuscation?
"What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important." — Dwight D. Eisenhower
🔑 This issue at a glance (2-second summary)
There's a new kind of vacation nobody talks about. You don't take it to relax. You take it to finally ship the important work that keeps getting buried. I call it a "focuscation," and this issue shows you how to take one.
I said a strange sentence out loud that caught me off guard...
"I need a vacation... but just to work."
Sounds backwards, right? Who dreams of getting away so they can work more?
But I'm not talking about the everyday work. Not the inbox. Not the fires. Not the client calls. I'm talking about the other bucket. If you know the Eisenhower matrix, it's the "important but not urgent" column.
The book you keep meaning to write. The new offer you keep meaning to build. The systems that would change everything if you ever sat down and built them.
That's the work that actually moves the needle in your life. And it's the work that always loses, because urgent beats important every single day of the week.
So here's the concept I'm playing with. You already know two kinds of time off:
A vacation: get away from it all and escape work entirely.
A staycation: stay home, relax, spend nothing on flights.
I'm adding a third: a focuscation. Time away from the day-to-day, but you don't go to relax. You block off a week, cut off the noise, and knock out the deep work you've been deferring for months. No meetings. No errands. No "quick questions." Just you and the projects that matter most.
You'd be shocked how much ships in one uninterrupted week.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg famously take Think Weeks. They inspired me to do that too. Sometimes I would check into a hotel to just read through a stack of books and...think. It was very beneficial, but a Think Week is input. Reading, studying, reflecting.
A focuscation is output. You're not going away to ponder. You're going away to build.
Winners take action
Want to take your own focuscation? Three rules.
Pick the outcome before you pick the dates. Go in with clear intention: "When this week ends, X will exist." A finished course. A launched offer. A written manuscript. If you can't name the deliverable, you're just booking a quiet room to check email in.
Go somewhere a little boring. This is counterintuitive, but don't pick a destination that pulls at you. No sightseeing temptation, no resort amenities you feel obligated to use because you paid for them. You want an environment that removes distraction, not one that adds it. A plain city hotel beats a beach villa for this.
Block five days minimum. A weekend isn't enough to get into deep work and finish something real. Put it on the calendar like a client engagement, because that's what it is. You're the client.
The tools you need
Problem: It all feels important. You have a dozen things that need to get done, but you can't rank them. You don't want to show up to your focus week and spend the first two days sorting through the pile instead of building.
System: Before you leave, let your AI agent do the sorting. Hand it your real data, your to-do list, your inbox, your calendar, your past conversations, and let it organize your urgent/important matrix for you. Then walk in on day one with a clear plan and a clear head.
Try this in 10 minutes:
Open your main AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, OpenClaw, Hermes, whatever you use).
It should already be connected to your tools and have context about you, your business, and your goals. Make sure those connectors are on and working.
Then paste this prompt:
"I'm planning a focuscation, a dedicated week to ship important work I keep deferring. You are connected to my email and my calendar, and you are also aware of my goals and what I'm working on, so help me prioritize what to focus on during this focuscation. Organize my open items into an Eisenhower matrix: urgent/important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither. Then answer three questions: (1) What should I focus on first during my focuscation? Pick the one 'important but not urgent' item with the highest upside. (2) What can you help me with right now, drafts, research, outlines, task breakdowns, so I walk in with a head start? (3) What can you take off my plate entirely while I'm away, follow-ups, scheduling, recurring tasks I do manually?"
Review the matrix and find a distraction-free place to take action.
This week on the pod
This week on King Moves (Three New Types of Vacation That Will Change Your Life | Ep. 143), Justin and I go deep on all three: the health week, the think week, and the focuscation.
We get into why the older we get, the more we have to manage our health by the numbers, just like a business. We also get a surprise guest appearance from Justin's five-month-old son Harrison, who has strong opinions about the whole thing.
That leads us to the focuscation concept, and the broader idea that you need different kinds of time away for different dimensions of your life. Not just rest. Not just input. Output, too.
If you've been kicking your own cans down the road, this one's your nudge.
Stop playing life on hard mode. Automate your success.
Until next week,
Ethan King
A.I. Automation for Business Growth
Keynote Speaker | Author | CEO | Strategist
P.S. For WTC26 attendees only: On Monday, August 24, I'm spending four hours live helping a small group set up their first AI hire: an AI executive assistant that executes real assignments across the software you already use. If you can send a text, you can run this. You'll leave with it already working, not another list of AI ideas. Enrollment closes Friday, August 14 at midnight Eastern, and everyone who's in gets the recording plus 30 days of follow-up support. Details and your seat are here.
P.P.S. Australia/virtual: The Agentic Advantage. 90 minutes live on Zoom, where I walk you through all six levels and show you the exact systems I run in my own businesses. Hosted by Basic Bananas. Monday, August 17, 8:00pm PT (Tuesday the 18th, 10:00am AEST for my Australia crew). The replay is included if you can't make it live. Grab your seat here.
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