{"id":40280,"date":"2025-12-07T10:21:41","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T10:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/im-a-ceo-who-takes-a-3-day-silent-retreat-every-year-i-book-an-airbnb-cover-the-clocks-and-let-my-mind-wander-its-changed-my-life\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T10:21:41","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T10:21:41","slug":"im-a-ceo-who-takes-a-3-day-silent-retreat-every-year-i-book-an-airbnb-cover-the-clocks-and-let-my-mind-wander-its-changed-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/im-a-ceo-who-takes-a-3-day-silent-retreat-every-year-i-book-an-airbnb-cover-the-clocks-and-let-my-mind-wander-its-changed-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m a CEO who takes a 3-day silent retreat every year. I book an Airbnb, cover the clocks, and let my mind wander &mdash; it&#8217;s changed my life."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6934875a7ecd1d1da6631392?format=jpeg\" alt=\"A man holds a rusty metal A-frame beside a frozen, snow-covered pond on a sunny winter day.\"\/><figcaption>Noah Greenberg takes an annual 3-day silent retreat.<\/p>\n<p>Kellock Irvin<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Annual three-day silent retreats help Noah Greenberg achieve a better work-life balance.<\/li>\n<li>He shuts off his phone and uses the time to work on personal and professional goals for the new year.<\/li>\n<li>His checklist for a retreat includes journals, comfy clothes, and running shoes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Noah Greenberg, 35, the co-founder and CEO of Stacker, based in New York. It&#039;s been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In the week between Christmas and New Year&#039;s, I go away for an annual three-day silent retreat. I leave my computer behind, turn off my phone, bring a journal, cover all the clocks, and give myself time to think.<\/p>\n<p>I started the tradition in 2020 because I was working from home, opening my computer in bed, and spending the day there. I felt stuck in that loop.<\/p>\n<p>The first year had such a profound impact on me personally and professionally that I kept going. After five years, here are my takeaways \u2014 and why I&#039;ve come to realize my retreat works better when there&#039;s almost no preparation involved.<\/p>\n<h2>I book an Airbnb between Christmas and New Year&#039;s for 3 days<\/h2>\n<p>I&#039;d always considered doing a formal silent retreat, but taking a week off to be completely unreachable seemed like a lot. Then I realized that I didn&#039;t need an organized retreat; I could design one myself.<\/p>\n<p>I decided to go for it. The first two times, I was in California for the holidays, so I booked an Airbnb in upstate Northern California. Since then, I&#039;ve been doing it in upstate New York.<\/p>\n<p>Doing it between Christmas and New Year&#039;s helps me feel less anxious because it&#039;s easier to step away when I feel like things at my media company, Stacker, are already slowing down. When I arrived at my Airbnb that first year and turned my phone off, knowing it would be off for the entire weekend, it felt incredible.<\/p>\n<h2>It can be uncomfortable to sit with my thoughts, but that&#039;s where the value is<\/h2>\n<p>My checklist for a silent retreat includes journals, comfy clothes, running shoes, or hiking gear if I&#039;m going somewhere with snow, and groceries, which I pick up on the way so that I don&#039;t need to leave once I arrive. I don&#039;t bring my computer, books, podcasts, or anything else that would distract me from my thoughts.<\/p>\n<p>I put Post-It Notes over the clocks so I can&#039;t tell the time while I&#039;m there. I find it really interesting when I&#039;m living without time. I think I go to bed way earlier when I&#039;m there, even though I can&#039;t tell the time. It&#039;s usually pretty soon after the sun sets.<\/p>\n<p>Going hiking while I&#039;m there is a great way to get my steps in, since I spend the rest of my time sitting inside on the couch, journaling. I try to get out of the house twice a day.<\/p>\n<p>When I&#039;m home, I never take an hourlong walk without headphones, just seeing where my thoughts take me. But on my retreat, I have enough discipline to remind myself that I&#039;ve paid for this Airbnb, rented a car, and driven upstate, and I&#039;m going to commit to it for three days.<\/p>\n<h2>Too much preparation for the trip can ruin it<\/h2>\n<p>In the week leading up to a retreat, I&#039;ll sit down and journal for an hour so I go in with a list of things that have been on my mind, for work and personally. The first time I did it, I didn&#039;t prepare at all.<\/p>\n<p>There&#039;s a lot of value in going and letting everything pour out in a journal that first night to see how I should spend the next couple of days. Too much preparation beforehand means I have to ensure I resolve certain things, which is counterproductive and puts too much pressure on the trip.<\/p>\n<p>I let people in my life know that I&#039;m turning my phone off for three days. I usually try to schedule it over a weekend, as it&#039;s only a day or two offline from work. If you&#039;re a CEO and you can&#039;t take three days off without your team needing you, you&#039;ve got bigger problems.<\/p>\n<h2>My retreats have transformed my habits and improved my life overall<\/h2>\n<p>These retreats are as valuable for my impact at the company as they are for my overall work-life balance. One year, I realized I wanted to establish a morning routine. I drew out my ideal morning routine, which included waking up at 6 a.m. every day, and now I wake up at six without an alarm.<\/p>\n<p>I always try to think about my work goals and what&#039;s going well and what&#039;s not. There have been times when I realized that a process with my team had been frustrating me, but I was in nonstop grind mode, ignoring that. After I came back from my retreat, I sat down with the team, and we thought about how we can make changes.<\/p>\n<p>I always spend time thinking about what it would mean to me if, at the end of next year, I could say this was a great year. What would that look like?<\/p>\n<p>This year, one of my goals was to have 52 coffees with people in 52 weeks to push myself to get out there more. I developed my calendar mapping habit based on my goals last year, which has improved my productivity.<\/p>\n<h2>I learned that it&#039;s OK for it not to have a profound effect every year, but there&#039;s still value in doing the trip annually<\/h2>\n<p>The first year I did this, it felt truly transformational in many ways. Midway through my second year, I experienced a sense of disappointment, as if, <em>&quot;<\/em>Oh, this doesn&#039;t feel as impactful as last year.&quot; I realized that a lot of the things that were bothering me a year ago, I&#039;d already fixed.<\/p>\n<p>I&#039;ve learned that if I go in with certain expectations, they&#039;re usually not met. Since then, I&#039;ve been intentional about not expecting it to live up to the high of that first trip. I want to make it its own journey each year.<\/p>\n<p><em>Do you have a similar story to share? Contact this editor, Agnes Applegate, at <\/em><em>aapplegate@businessinsider.com<\/em><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Noah Greenberg takes an annual 3-day silent retreat. Kellock Irvin Annual three-day silent retreats help Noah Greenberg achieve a better work-life balance. He shuts off his phone and uses the time to work on personal and professional goals for the new year. His checklist for a retreat includes journals, comfy clothes, and running shoes. This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40281,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40280","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}