Life gets busy.  You say 'yes' to things to fill up your life and your time and pretty soon your days are filled with back-to-back commitments.  And life becomes an endless chain of doing.

You get better at what you're doing, because you're doing it all the time - practising, and so improving incrementally.

Going on break enables you to breakaway from the day-to-day busyness and assess yourself for how you're actually doing.  And this allows you to step back and come up with ideas that you didn't see before, that don't just incrementally improve your performance, but causes a paradigm shift.

For example, last year, I ran around and gave 140 speeches, studied at uni, worked on my final year project and worked on Robogals.

I didn't have time to do all of that, let alone sleep or assess how well I was doing at all my commitments.

Now that I've been having a planned break for a week, I'm reassessing everything I do, and I'm so excited about my insights into my life.

For example, I was just going around and speaking continuously last year, with no time to assess how I was doing.  But during my break, I realised that there was a whole another dimension to my speech-giving that I'd never tapped or realised before.  By getting that breakthrough, I now know something that can fundamentally shift my speech-making abilities.  And I know how I can systematically improve.

This was an area I didn't know how to work on before.  But going on break makes you assess everything in your life, and good things come out of that.

I also had all these plans for what I would do after my break.  But by taking time off, I realised that doing all those plans and projects wouldn't make me content, that I was doing some of the projects for the wrong reasons, and that what I really need to do is just focus on my core projects and bring more balance into my life by hanging out with my friends.

So go on a break, reassess, and come back with more clarify, focus and energy.  Bring back a plan that causes a paradigm shift in what you're doing.