Take a Vacation and Don’t Travel

Here’s an idea: Take a whole week off and just stay where you are. Don’t travel. Don’t fill it with a activities and classes and errands. Just take the time off, with no plans, and see what happens. I tried this for the first time last year, in the second-last week of December.

And it was the most glorious thing ever.

You see, whenever I took vacations in the past, I’d usually be travelling. Travelling is great, but has its downsides: My days are often so packed with activities and logistics and worries that I’ll miss my flight. So I often don’t have time to really rest, ruminate, and rummage through my mind.

When I took that week off last year in Singapore, I spent less time than I expected on indulgent things that I would fantasize about all year, like binging on TV shows and just staring into space. Those got boring after like, half a day.

Instead, I did all the stuff that I said I was going to do more of in 2023 but didn’t actually do. I exercised. I prayed. Heck, I even opened a book – a real book! – took it to Guzman Y Gomez and sat there for 2 hours reading. Junk food + business stories are a fun combination.

Also, funnily enough, I thought more about work during that week than I actually do. The free time gave me the space to think about work in an unstructured, creative way. It was a luxury that I don’t get in my typical back-to-back-meetings-sorry-I-know-I-owe-you-a-reply-I’ll-get-to-it-by-end-of-week workday.

I could finally stop hammering the same old business problems and frustrations, and let my mind daydream about new (often stupid) ideas. How do I make client conversations more fun? Do I really need this dumbass tracker that nobody cares about? Should I write a newsletter? Should I rearrange my bookmarks? (Yes, the fact that my brain considers this exciting says a lot about how damaged I am as a person)

In the book Build (great book btw) ex-Apple exec Tony Fadell writes about how Steve Jobs used his vacations as opportunities to ruminate and dream about work:

Steve would typically take two weeks off, twice a year. We’d always dread those vacations at Apple. The first forty-eight hours were quiet. After that it would be a storm of incoming calls.

He wasn’t tied up in meetings, worrying about the day-to-day, so he was free. Free to dream about the future of Apple at all hours of the day and night. Free to call and get our thoughts on whatever crazy idea just occurred to him – what about video glasses to watch movies from the video iPod? Yes? No? He’d want us to give our perspective right then or find answers fast so he could refine his thinking.

He worked harder on vacation than he did in the office.

I’m no Steve Jobs, but my Dec experiment convinced me about the importance of having some free space. We all need time to properly disconnect, no just from work, but also from life in general. To “waste time”, to properly rest, and dream.

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Personal note: Hello! I know it’s been awhile. 2023 has been a crazy year of ups and downs. I had the most intense swings last year than I ever had in my life: A lot of really bad stuff happened, but also a lot of really GREAT stuff, including witnessing the most incredible act of generosity which ended up saving my father’s life (long story). It’s a reminder that EVERYTHING is a gift. Those intense swings have made it hard for me to update the blog last year, but I hope to do more of it in 2024.