Mission Days Guide: A Personal Retreat Framework

What Are Mission Days?

A Mission Days retreat is designed to give you the mental and physical space to step away from the daily work/life routine. It creates an environment to foster creativity for new ideas and life goals, while providing a framework to evaluate your current personal and professional efforts. You can assess whether your current path is truly aligned with reaching your life goals, and evaluate how you're maintaining your health and well-being.

The fundamental goal is to remove daily inputs—texts, social media, emails, phone calls—to create time and space for your mind to get bored. Once bored, you focus on a specific set of prompts you've prepared in advance to guide your thinking towards productive and transformative insights. The key is embracing boredom, then repeatedly returning to your prompts. This process fosters creativity, and ideally by the retreat's end, you'll have specific action items to advance your life goals, happiness, and sense of meaning.

The Mission Days Philosophy

Different people respond to different formats, but Dave's approach centers on being in a place of serenity and natural beauty, with minimal contact with daily distractions and people. In this sense, Mission Days resembles a meditation retreat. However, while meditation may be part of your practice, the goal isn't to quiet your thoughts completely.

Instead, you allow your thoughts to continue—which they always will anyway—but focus them on specific prompts that act as guardrails for your contemplation. Think of this less as a meditation retreat and more as a focused, intentional contemplation retreat. You're not emptying your mind; you're directing it purposefully toward the questions and areas of life that matter most.

The Basic Process

Prepare Your Prompts

Prior to the retreat, list out questions or inspirational statements to act as prompts guiding your thinking. These prompts can cover both professional and personal goals—the latter helps you excel at the former. A comprehensive list of potential questions and thought starters appears later in this guide.

Minimize Inputs

While the retreat's goal isn't to catch up on reading, you can bring something inspirational or highly informative to your thinking process. Remember, this isn't a time for inputs—you want to get bored and let your mind wander as much as possible, then keep returning to your prepared prompts.

Choose Your Location

Select a place that ideally doesn't have internet access. If it does, keep your wifi or cell connection disconnected during the retreat, accounting for whatever family check-ins you may need if you have children or people you must remain in touch with.

Support Your Process

If it helps, plan to exercise or listen to music at times to get you in the right mood and mindset as the retreat progresses. Bring some way to record and process your thoughts as they arise—laptop or journal.

Dave uses his laptop with two open Word documents: one to list all his initial prompts/questions and record his thoughts as they arise, and a separate document for action items (personal and professional) that emerge during the retreat. He also uses audio messages/memos on his phone to save ideas as they arise when he's not at his computer, or when he wakes during the night with insights but doesn't want to work on his computer. You can simply keep paper and pen with you.

Create Action Items

Ideally you'll finish the retreat with a list of specific action items—some mundane, some important. If things need more thought, get them into your follow-up workflow so they aren't forgotten when you return to your daily routine. For example, schedule time to continue thinking about a topic and make a decision, or schedule meetings with others to continue the thinking process. The retreat's goal is action to do things better moving forward!

Retreat Schedule

Mission Days should span at least two full days, morning to night. It can also extend into the day prior as you travel to your location, and the day after as you travel home. In this sense, it touches four days.

Day Before

Block sufficient time to catch up on all emails so as much as possible you don't have anything petty making you feel you can't go away. Set an "out of office" responder to be active while you're gone.

Day One: Arrival

Travel and get situated. If it's early enough and you feel inspired, read your prompts and begin noting down thoughts and responses. Otherwise, just relax and settle in.

Day Two: First Full Day

Your first full day unplugged. Begin or continue to ponder the prompts and note thoughts that arise. Some might be personal or mundane, others might be great ideas or things you want to explore further. Write them all down so you know nothing will be forgotten. Don't judge your ideas and thoughts—just let yourself get bored due to lack of inputs and lack of schedule, and note what arises.

Day Three: Second Full Day

Your second full day unplugged. Continue the process from the previous day, deepening your contemplation and expanding your insights.

Day Four: Departure

This is the day you travel home. Try to wrap up thoughts, condense or organize any ideas and follow-ups. Begin the transition back to your regular life with clarity and purpose.

Day After: Integration

Block a half day upon your return or soon thereafter to operationalize next steps and take notes for optimizing your next personal retreat. Perhaps edit your original list of prompts for next time, based on your experience.

Sample Questions for Your Retreat

Preparing questions you want to ask yourself in advance will help guide your retreat. Here are some samples you may want to use or adapt for yourself.

Purpose and Direction

• What am I trying to accomplish in my limited time on this planet?
• Why have I made it my goal to try to accomplish it?
• What is my "future me" telling me right now that I will wish I had known or done?

Professional Life

• What is the professional life I want to be leading right now?
• What is stopping me?
• What is the professional future I want to live into?
• Am I working with smart, creative, positive people?
• Is my work fun, and using my unique talents?
• Have I set clear and engaging goals with dates to complete?
• What is not perfect in my work? How can I fix that?

Personal Life

• What is the personal life I want to be leading right now?
• What is stopping me?
• What is the personal future I want to live into?
• What is not perfect in my personal life right now? How can I fix that?
• Who do I want to spend more time with and how can I make that happen?

Health and Well-Being

• What is not perfect in how I feel physically? How can I fix that?
• What does my perfect day look like?

Inspirational Thoughts to Ponder

Here is a collection of thoughts to ponder and possibly include in what you want to think about on your retreat. You can also read any other inspirational notes or readings you have that might inspire you at the start of the retreat.

On Presence and Awareness

Be here now. Be present. Be attentive.

The things that appear important in the short term often are not important at all. They are what you are doing today—and the mind makes them important because they are what you are doing. You are not doing them because they are important. Their false urgency will be echoed by others involved for the same reason. When something feels urgent and there is stress connected to it, be skeptical and defend your time and your health. Will it matter in a year? On my last breath?

This, right now, is the best moment ever. Live each moment fully. Life is too precious to miss a single moment. Slow down. Savor. Pay attention. Notice the small things. Be grateful.

On Meaning and Purpose

What is the meaning of your life?

What are you here to do? What is your unique contribution? What legacy do you want to leave? What impact do you want to have? What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

On Living Fully

Don't just think outside the box, live outside the box.

What you are doing right now in this moment is what you are spending your life doing. If what you did today is not what you want to be doing, what would the consequences be of not doing what you want? Can you accept them?

What are you not saying that needs to be said?

You get answers to the questions you ask. What is the question you need to be asking yourself right now?

Be open to what the universe is trying to teach you even if it is not what you think you are here to learn.