Rolling with a laptop on vacation…
In contrast to last week’s theme of intimidation, this week I’m fortunate to be on vacation. I’m curious to see how my entries and writing may or may not be different from the entries I write when I’m thick in the throes of my day-to-day life at home. I started this blog when on vacation at the beginning of this year, after getting unexpectedly stuck for an extra week in Puerto Rico. A few months later I find myself fortunate to be writing from the Dominican Republic.
I’m also excited that Ghost.org, the organization that developed and maintained this blog platform has updated the software to allow me to write posts from my iPad. Over the past couple of years, even before I started to experiment with just rolling with it, I started making a conscious attempt to leave my laptop at home when going on vacation.
At first, doing this was an attempt to resist the urge I would have to “take just a few minutes” to “check-in on a few things”. I realized that doing this could shift my entire mind set out of vacation mode, which would then take considerable time and effort to return to, once I left it. Similarly to marking the evening transition, I learned over time that a conscious effort was required for me to shift out of work mode and into vacation mode. Jumping back and forth between the two wasn’t something that came easy for me to do.
After a while, leaving the laptop at home also became more symbolic, as it would become a conscious decision to help me mark the transition from work mode to vacation mode. This is similar to how I actually turn off my computer screen at home to mark and emphasize the times during the day when I am marking the evening transition.
Despite my best efforts this time, I decided to take my laptop with me on vacation. There were a few last minute tax details that needed handling and it turned out that the filing deadline would fall when I’d be gone. Rather than get too caught up in the implications of having to take the laptop and realizing that having it would let me get done what I needed to and back to vacation more quickly, I just rolled with it, packed up the laptop and resolved to keep it stored out of sight in a closet when I wasn’t using it. This seemed to work, as having the laptop saved me time getting done what I needed to and keeping it stored out of site removed the temptation and instinct to use it out of habit.