In other parts of the world, business owners take a lot longer vacations. Pretty cool in my book. In the US, people seem to get paranoid about taking vacations from a corporate job and especially from their own businesses. They think they’ll lose their jobs or their businesses will close up.
Two weeks in a year just isn’t enough time to rejuvenate. If you work for 40 years that’s just 80 weeks off and 2000 week working. No wonder folks seem so frazzled or acquire stress related illnesses.
I wonder how many folks have been fired for taking a vacation. I can’t believe it’s that many. One of my old bosses took a vacation but he gave them his phone number and his bosses called him night and day. He probably did more work on vacation than he did at work. That’s not a vacation.
Here are some of my personal vacation rules:
1) Don’t take your laptop or answer your cell. You owe it to your mental and physical health to get away from the work madness. Stay as unwired as possible.
2) Don’t talk about work with your vacation companions. It can wait.
3) Don’t think about work. Think about where you are. Drifting into work mode defeats the whole purpose of taking a vacation.
4) Do relax and have a good time. We spend too much time working as it is, nothing worse than letting work creep into your fun time. If anything, expand your fun time.
Maybe we should work for two weeks? And have fun the other fifty?
Sometimes it seems like we have things all backwards.