Take a break.
When he was starting out in his career as a pastor, my father was prone to work too hard. Ministers often work seven days a week, going into the office Monday through Friday, chaperoning youth groups or peforming weddings on Saturday, and then leading services on Sunday.
But it gets to be too much, as my dad discovered when his voice — he was a music minister and singing soloist — began to suffer from overuse. A good doctor prescribed a real vacation, and somewhere along the way Dad read that the best vacations are the ones that are most different from one’s usual routine. If you usually work indoors, vacation outdoors; if your work is sedentary, take an active vacation; if your work is physically demanding, make sure to loaf on vacation; and so on.
In Dad’s case, the results were excellent. Our family vacations, which often had us camping in National Parks, recharged his batteries wonderfully. It got to the point that he couldn’t imagine doing his job without taking that annual vacation in mid-summer. Now I’m the same way.
These days, lots of folks complain about being overconnected — and overworked. They take their laptops or Blackberries or iPhones with them everywhere, convinced that they can’t afford to be out of touch even for a few days. Sure, some people really are that vital to their enterprises — heads of state, CEOs, entrepreneurs building their businesses from scratch. And maybe there are a few people out there who genuinely find that the always-on mode of communication relaxes and energizes them. If you’re of those people, more power to you.
But you’re probably not. You’re probably one of the rest of us who benefit greatly from unplugging, at least once in a while.
Leave your laptop in its bag, turn your Blackberry off, and sit by a lake or a seashore or a mountain stream. Watch the sun rise. Decompress. Think. Maybe take along a blank notepad for writing down thoughts in some form besides to-do’s.
Many of us, I believe, would be much better served to do less scurrying and more thinking in our careers. And many of us can improve our physical and mental health — and thus our long-term abilities to do our jobs — by occasionally decompressing totally.
It doesn’t have to be for three weeks. It doesn’t have to be at a fancy resort or on the other side of the world (though I hear Moorea is lovely). But it should be somewhere that allows you to take deep breaths, operate at a different pace, and get out of the hurly-burly for a little bit.
Try it. My guess is you’ll be glad you did.
~
Photo by Kasper Sorensen, used under a Creative Commons license.
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Tim, what a refreshing piece. You have me day-dreaming of my family vacations growing up in Michigan, camping by the Great Lakes. I think your dad has it just right. There’s nothing better for body, mind and soul than a day (or an hour) spent by the lake, with just a notebook and pen. If we don’t take time to process and evaluate everything that we’re reading and connecting to these days, we won’t be nearly as effective or innovative (or healthy). Thanks for the reminder!
Turned off instant messenger before there were commercial releases, schedule cell phone msg browsing, etc. etc. But my best story is taking a good buddy from the IBM consulting group and his wife sailing in the BVI’s. First vac by themselves they’d had in years. Coming from a culture that used to pride itself on it’s red-eye quotient he wanted to know where to plug in his laptop and if the cell would reach. Picture it – we’re offshore for a week in a 38′ cat and he thinks he can read e-mail. Of course by the time we went eating and drinking at Foxy’s he knew better.
Thanks for your comment, Liz. I wrote this post more than a week ago, but it went live while I was still on a New England vacation spent . . . on the shore of a lake.
We can’t be at our best if we never recharge our batteries, and everything I’ve seen tells me that we also won’t carry out innovative work if we never get any distance from our day-to-day chores. My week in the North Woods helped me to get clear on several aspects of my own work, both in abstract terms and in the sense of giving me simple next steps to take on some key projects. It seems I never get that kind of perspective until I step outside my normal routines.