How to bring your “vacation-self” to the real world

Book, Glasses, Sun Hat, Camera on a Deck with text Bring Vacation You to the Real World, No Flights Required, by Rikki Goldenberg, Executive Leadership Coach, Career Coach, Vacation, PTO

It’s just the start of March when spring breaks are planned, we think winter should be over, and we’re already imagining a summer trip.

Enter, Vacation Rikki. Vacation Rikki is a little more relaxed. She can sleep in until 7:45! She doesn’t need to have every minute planned! She isn’t fretting about where her phone is at all time. She can read an entire book in one sitting by the pool with a tasty beverage!

She also feels like an anomaly. Because she is. She exists as a moment in time when my focus can sit completely on my own desires. I can read an entire book. I can forgo my phone. I can get caught up in an incredible meal.

And that resonates while I read Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The journalist takes us on a detailed, well-researched deep dive into the attention crisis, or the fact that we’re struggling to maintain focus. Spoiler: It’s all of us, and it’s not necessarily your fault. It’s the world.

He leaves his cell phone and internet access behind to venture off to Provincetown (my favorite childhood vacation spot!), and he enters the world of no (tech) distractions. It is glory, it is wonder, it is fabulous - once he gets used to the oddness.

Have you ever felt for your phone and opened an app that you actually just closed out of but didn’t even notice you were doing it?

Yeah. Me too.

For the average American, “we touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.”

It’s not just you.

And you can be annoyed with yourself, but, you can also recognize that most technology was literally created to keep you inside of it. Every application, website, technology - they measure how long you spend with it. Hell, even childrens toys have a measurement of how long the average kid with play with it as an indicator of strong performance!

So, if that’s their goal, why would they ever make you not want to use it?! You’re not only working against yourself, you’re also working against the brilliance of technology that was thoroughly researched and tested to keep you there.

And yet, Vacation-Provincetown-Spring Break you is able to resist. We’re able to focus on ourselves, our needs, and relaxation.

The real question is - how can you bring a little Vacation-You into Real-Life-You?

I have some ideas. Let’s check it out.

💡 Biggest whoa moment: “In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being - TV, radio, reading - it amounted to 40 newspapers’ worth of information everyday. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day.” Simply put, Sune Lehmann adds that we’re “drinking from a fire hose - there’s too much coming at us.” Of course we can’t focus, our brains are try to absorb 4x more information from the entire universe all at once in our tiny shiny lightbox!

🌱 Put it into practice now: You may hate some of these ideas, but, if we want a little Vacation-You into Real-Life-You… here are some options to incorporate.

1. Bring some vacation home - Bring home something. It could be a ritual, a reminder, and enjoyable activity that happened while you were gone. This could even look like snagging a fun souvenir or memory item - Negronis became our drink of choice after an Italy trip, tinned fish filled our pantry after Portugal, and we hoarded sake cups post Japan!

2. Sleep more - Did you know that “40% of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived, getting less than the necessary minimum of seven hours a night”? Yeah. Part of why vacation is amazing is because we get to sleep more. So do that. Please.

3. Read (for fun!) - I read a lot. And I read a lot for work, which I nerdily and truly enjoy. However! I also read for fun. 57% of Americans don’t read a single book in a typical year. But the more novels you read, the better you are at reading other people’s emotions. (Thanks Raymond Mar!) So, if you wait until the beach for your beach read, just tell yourself you’re learning how to improve your emotional intelligence… for work.

4. Move without goals - In a regular world, we focus on maximizing our efficiency and potential with things. The world of HIIT, or crash diets, or these 5 hacks! On vacation, many of us skip workouts, we focus instead on movement for enjoyment. So skip the workout, and try a yoga sesh, or a long walk instead. Or get a dog. Can I meet it?

5. Daydream - without requirements, needs, or the endless slog - we can forget to allow ourselves to think openly and loosely. Create daydream time in your week or day to let the brain just, well, wander! Bonus points if you’re wandering physically at the same time.

The book itself (which is good!) delivers a strong understanding of just how messy our attention is. Read it!

And yet, the thing that stuck with me was how in a perfect vacuum (vacation us!) We can act in our best interest, but the tricky party is that we don’t live perpetually on vacation. It’s hard to keep that going otherwise.

So, here we are. Some ideas of how to meld a little more vacation time into real time.

And if vacation-you is a lovely, inquisitive, self-improvement, and self-discovery person but forgets the idea of taking all kinds of new actions around your relationship with work when you get back to reality… we should talk.

Dive deeper
Read the book yourself: Stolen Focus
Listen to some of the interviews: Interviews!
Read my blog post on Deep Work from Cal Newport if that was where you were hoping this newsletter was going: Increase Your Deep Work Capacity

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