Getting Things Done Double-time

Never underestimate the power of taking time off

One of the larger projects recently finished: replacement finials in some of the hardest soft maple I have ever carved. Photo by author.

Vacations are great. They are an opportunity to rest and reset. And sometimes the function exactly as expected.

Honestly, though, I can’t say that I knew exactly what to expect. When it comes to taking time off, I am way out of practice.

In the past, more times than not, I’ve brought along my computer. If you’ve an iMac, you may have discovered how well they nestle into the back seat of a car. Strap on the seatbelt and pack around it. It takes hardly any room. With it along, problems that comes along can be handled quickly.

So I thought hard about that. In the end, I left it in my home office and packed only the iPad. It’s the big one, with keypad and pencil and I figured I could take care of most emergencies with it. Mainly I planned to use it only for writing and email. Writing because it is my primary writing tool. Email because with several hundred coming in daily, I can’t afford to let it build up for a week or more.

In the end, I had a wonderful vacation on the beach. Got sunburned three times (always somewhere different), chowed on by scads of insects, and even pulled a muscle attempting to paddleboard. I opened the iPad only once every few days to clear the email and write and otherwise ignored most everything else.

There’s a problem, when you are the owner of a micro-business. You may be on vacation, but your customers aren’t. The work that develops while you are gone needs to be done when you get back asap. So for darn sake, don’t schedule more than you absolutely have to for the week you get back. There will be things to do that you never dreamed of.

I got back Sunday night. Monday morning I had a to-do list the length of my arm. Fortunately, nothing catastrophic, but a whole bunch of little things that hadn’t been on the list a week ago.

Before vacation, I plodded along, but the task list week over week got longer, not shorter. A couple of big projects were done before leaving, so I felt good about that, but the sense of losing ground was strong.

While relaxing in the water, searching for arrowheads on the beach and doing other vacation-y things, I thought about how I would use my new-restored energy to…