1/ Vacationing is more than just a cultural practice where your participation depends on your resources and norms around you.
2/ It is also a learned skill: you have to get good at vacationing smart in both material habits and mental habits.
3/ How quickly you can unwind and gather momentum again determines how effective your vacation and other relaxation habits are.
4/ I've been taking progressively less time "off" over the last two decades since leaving college, but getting much better at the skill of making it count.
5/ I can now get more of a recharge out of a weekend off than I could with a week off a decade ago. I'm also better at quick-recharges throughout the day/week.
6/ A big part of it of course, is going free-agent, which gives you a kind of control over time, attention, and energy management that a paycheck job does not.
7/ Another big part is not uncritically buying into ideas that you have to unplug digitally in order to relax. Or other such pastoral myths about relaxation.
8/ While exposure to nature and/or a change of scenery are a big part of vacationing smart, needing to 'disconnect' digitally means you haven't mastered your tools, they've mastered you
9/ I actually find it easier to take breaks now if I don't expect myself to clear the digital decks to inbox zero, or leave devices and workflows behind in a stabilized state.
10/ Your work life is not an ER patient. If it's a high-stress spike of work getting it 'stabilized' before you can take a break, you're doing something wrong.
11/ Like 'night mode' on phones, 'vacation mode' in workflow simply means you shift digital workflows to a different 'mood'
12/ Some streams are on pause, others slow down, still others change character. Maybe you tweet pictures instead of tech-news links. Maybe chat with a different crowd online.
13/ Vacation auto-responders are for amateurs. If you can't field a critical email while on the beach, and get right back to relax-mode, your vacation-fu game is off.
14/ Vacationing smart means different things to different people, but what you cannot avoid is thinking through what it means to you.
15/ To simply mimic somebody else's relaxation rituals and habits uncritically is to guarantee you won't actually relax or recharge. You'll just be larping local relaxation ceremonies.
16/ Still though, I have a lot more to learn, so I'm off to work on my relaxation skills in British Columbia for the weekend.
17/ So I'll stop here with a shorter-than-usual tweetstorm portion. See you next week!
Note: thanks to those who pointed out the formatting error last week, which led to the tweetstorm part being repeated twice. Apologies for any reading annoyance that may have caused.
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