I am going to stray away from my typical blog topics, but by the end it will be clear why. I don’t take vacations very well. Even if we get away, often I don’t actually vacation. Last week was different. I actually canceled all my meetings and didn’t open my laptop once. I had maybe two calls during the entire week.
Escaping is tough, when you come back the work is still there but I am lucky to have a strong team so the work didn’t really pile up as bad as it has in the past.
Additionally, vacations are supposed to be relaxing, this one started nothing like a relaxing vacation.
On Thursday it was clear that our flights into Eagle/Vail were going to be canceled due to a snow storm heading towards Colorado. I arrived home around 5pm and at 5:30pm we decided to scrap the attempted flights and drive. We left at 6pm, heading as far as we could make it enroute to Colorado. We made it to Lubbock around midnight, took a 6 hour nap, and continued the journey the next morning, making it to Beaver Creek before sundown.
Sixteen hours of driving on a 30 minute decision.
This vacation was long overdue, our last family trip was supposed to be last May but that obviously didn’t happen, and not taking a vacation for nearly two years is tough. Clearly, managing anything in 2020 was not much fun and getting away was needed.
As it turned out, it was great. We ended up with an extra day to ski and neither child killed the other, it was a win/win.
I not only disconnected from work, but I also took a week off of LinkedIn. Those that follow me know that I was pretty engaged there over the last couple of months, but I recently watched The Social Dilemma and quite frankly, I decided that I should fully control my life and there was no better time than while on vacation.
Call it a vacation from regular life.
The thing is, had we not made a decision that day to just drive, we wouldn’t have had a vacation.
Circling this back to work, if you don’t make a quick decision, the impact can be long lasting. In this case it was a crazy fast decision, but had we waited a day we would’ve found our flight canceled and stared at a potential blizzard-covered road. This quick decision allowed us to get away and allowed me to disconnect and enjoy a long overdue vacation. It allowed me to come back refreshed and even more driven to live up to our mission to Give Merchandisers Superpowers.
