Take a vacation!
Take a vacation, a long one. Don’t mess around with the 4 day weekend vacations, or even a week. If you are an IT person, you need to take a vacation long enough to make you forget passwords.
I just got back from my first real vacation in 3 years, and it was 2 weeks long. I turned off my phone and didn’t even turn on my laptop during for two weeks. Here is kinda how the “tech detox” went.
Day 1 – Packing up, cleaning the house
Day 2 – Head to the airport, stressful day flying to another country, but everything worked out
Day 3 – Orient yourself with your surroundings, still in tech mode (oh look, they have Internet Kiosks, must resist)
Day 4 – Eat, swim, eat, swim, eat
Day 5 – Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Day 6 – Lather, Rinse, Repeat, start to relax, play some volleyball
Day 7 – Forget first password
Day 8 – Almost turn on phone to data sync, wife slaps hand
Day 9 – Eat, swim, eat, swim, eat, ahhhhhhh……
Day 10 – ahhhhh……
Day 11 – ahhhhh……
Day 12 – Travel back to home, not as stressful as journey down
Day 13 – Start checking email again
So, you can see it took over a week to start to relax. I think that high tech folks have brains that are geared for retention and we suffer from withdrawal when we can’t IM, email or text. You have to recharge and detox every year, so figure out how you can get away for at least 2 weeks.
BTW, good luck Scoble, we will miss your candor and insight into Microsoft.
