Five Tips for Disconnecting from Work While on Vacation
I recently returned home from being on vacation. I spent the last week with my two sons who are 17 and 19, their 9 friends and 60,000 other people at Darien Lake in upstate New York. We camped and took in an awesome music festival: Lots of music, fun, food, and late nights, very late nights around the campfire talking, singing and dancing. It was a fantastic time.
While away, I tried as much as possible to leave the office at the office. I got as close to disconnected as I could. By that I mean I only checked my email twice a day, and on one day not at all. I had one meeting via phone with the person who would be CIO while I was away, and that was it!
As many of you know, if you stay connected to your job while on vacation, you do not get a break. You also frustrate the people you are vacationing with when you spend more time with your PDA than with them. Also, if you continue to "operate" the business from your vacation location you risk sending the message to your team that even though you left them in charge, you do not believe they are capable of running the operation in your absence. So disconnect for your own good, for the benefit of your friends and family, and to send a clear message to your team in the office that you trust them to execute.
If the idea of completely disconnecting makes your palms sweat—as it does for many IT executives—here are a few tips for easing the anxiety and staying disconnected:
Chris' Top Five Disconnecting Tips:
- Do not call anyone at the office, make sure everything is taken care of before you leave. When you say goodbye – MEAN IT!
- Lock your PDA in your car or your hotel's safe. Do not turn it on until your vacation is over. You know what they say: Out of sight, out of mind.
- Provide very clear "out of office" e-mail and voice mail messages to set expectations for those contacting you. Here is the message I use: “Please be advised that I am currently out of the office returning on Day, Month, Date, Year. During this time, will be Acting CIO, responsible for the Information Technology Division and City Call Center with my full-delegated authority. Please contact at (416) 555-1212.”
- If you must check your e-mail, resist the temptation to respond. If you start composing responses, you'll get sucked into an hour or more of activity. That's time that could be better spent swimming, fishing, sight-seeing, reading, walking… the options are endless. Save your responses for your return.
- If you do start thinking about work, make a quick note in a journal, get the thought out of your head, on paper and then move on, back to recreational activities.
If you don't follow these tips, you might find your BlackBerry at the bottom of a large body of water thrown in by a well-meaning family member who is concerned about your mental health.
With two weeks left before the start of school and the American Labor Day holiday, there's still plenty of time for a vacation, So if you have time off planned over the next few weeks, keep these tips in mind, enjoy your vacation, take a break and recharge! And let me know what you do to disconnect
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
