Getting Out of Routine

Vacation

I went out on vacation last week with my wife. It was more vacation for me and more academic conference for her. I had a great time in Boston. I had not taken much time off of work and there was a few things I wanted to explore when I was on vacation.

Ideal

I made a list of things to check out and do while I was on vacation. I was off work for five days, that’s plenty of time to do things. It’s a full forty hours, at least! I could achieve so much while I was in Boston. Things like:

• Visit friends there
• Get styles going on this site
• Learn more about SASS/SCSS to style the site
• Write a post about websocket rails
• Write a post about selenium-webdriver (which I talked about)
• Get on a call with my coding buddy to catch up more

Reality

The reality was: I got almost none of the things on the ideal list done. Most friends were out of town and/or busy. Styling a site requires so many small decisions (colors!) that I put off and thought maybe it would be better to work at the SASS level… which turns out better to learn SCSS… which I eventually found jekyll themes for, but I spent a whole day on just that, I might as well write content. The selenium-webdriver talk I gave was perfect to write up, but I ended up making that more terse than realistically possible. I never did get ahold of my coding buddy, he’s pretty busy too.

What did I really do with my time? Listened to trance, ended up chatting with a friend about ‘relationship stuff’, had heat stroke, walked (a lot!) spent time with one of the only people I keep in touch with from college, and spent time with my wife when she finished her talk.

Lesson

At the end, I realized I needed a real vacation. Not another opportunity to just work on other stuff. To clear my head a bit and think. At the same time, I was so out of my routine (I didn’t have proper work space, a heat wave passed through Boston and the best air conditioning I had easy access to was at the conference hall, my meals were on the road, etc.) that I really couldn’t focus on that ideal list unless I was at home. At the same time, having such a long list just set myself up for failure as well. That list was accomplishable if I had a stay-cation instead…

Take away

It’s good to get out of your routine and really go on a vacation. I realize how important it is to do that and when you’re out, enjoy that time out. Be here now.