An Airbnb executive left her job to win a gap year in South America along with her husband and three children.

Take Ania Smith, CEO of TaskRabbit, for example.

She was apparently a career high and worked as an executive at Airbnbwhen she quit it all; she packed herself into life and moved to Buenos Aires for a year in 2018 with her husband and three young children, and was suspended.

Despite the stigma surrounding the resume gap, Smith won a promotion for her return. Since then, I have seen her career move from strength to strength. And the 50-year-old chief says luck It depends largely on the major year reset that he gave her abroad, and, importantly, her marriage.

After all, how often do you get to get out of your routine and get a year to redefine your life?

Instead of backpacking, she enjoyed a life of unemployedness in a long lunch, a 10am cinema and a space to think

Unlike the typical backpacker of sabbatical, Smith’s year in the Argentine capital was not a spontaneous aspect. Bar from travel Patagoniathe family stayed in the same apartment, so the kids were able to attend a nearby school. It meant a normal routine like amazing awakening, school drop-offs, family dinners, bedtime and more. no Swimming alongside sharks and last minute gorilla trekking– Just the everyday structure in another country.

However, Smith and her husband spent a long day enjoying Spanish lessons, horseback riding, sloppy restaurant lunches and a trip to the movies at 10am on Tuesdays.

“It was jarring, but it was great too,” she said, adding that the first half of the overseas countryside they packed up too many activities and lessons (including dance and photography). “We didn’t want to waste it. There’s a lot to learn and a lot to see.” But then the realization came in that they didn’t actually give themselves the pause they needed.

“I also really think it’s good to have time to rethink what’s important to you,” she explains.

So, for the second half of the gap year, that’s exactly what we did. “We want to spend about five hours before picking up our kids, have that kind of conversation and live in the Bay Area? Do you want to move elsewhere? How about moving to Park City and skiing and doing less work?

“We had all sorts of discussions about life and there was time and space to do that, so we decided to go back to technology and work, and in fact, we came back to the Bay Area and it felt so right.

“But we’ve made some big changes,” she adds. One transformative change is how they divided the household chores.

The gap year showed the mental load of her husband running through the house, so she was able to enhance her career

Before the gap year, Smith says that despite his role at the time, household management often fell on his shoulders. “I was often the one who cared for all the doctor appointments of children, or for summer camp appointments. Or I made sure I had all the plans for the weekend.”

However, without the daily 9-5 grind, the roles automatically taken on when they became working parents soon disappeared.

“Neither of us worked, so we literally split the responsibility completely into the middle. And when we came back, it really got stuck.”

Smith believes that the gap year gave her husband a “deep understanding” of the mental load that he generally falls into. Working mother. Today, he takes on the majority of the job of managing the child’s routine.

“That meant that it was okay to have me playing a more strict role at this point while helping him manage the house,” she adds.

“And I don’t know if I could have done it without experience in Argentina. It’s really hard to understand what it means to carry the mental load of running a house, unless I have to do it myself.”

Really, it wasn’t just a gap year. It was a reset and instead of slipping into the default mode, I was able to rethink how they balance their ambitions and family life. Bottomline says, “We run C-suites and we can’t run our homes,” Smith says.