Toronto winters are pretty brutal. So like everyone else in my part of Canada, my family and I headed down to Orlando a couple of weeks ago to remember what the sun looks like. Well, almost all my family. I left my beloved work laptop at home. This sounds like something a normal person would do without a ton of thought. But it has been literally a decade since I took a vacation without a work laptop with me. This has been a defensive move to be available if needed, keep up with what is going on and to avoid a deluge of emails when I return. But I’m also conscious during a time that I should be trying to relax and ‘be present’, I always end up somewhat distracted, and paying attention to the wrong things. My out-of-office email notification becomes a private joke : I’m not here and won’t answer your email, but we all know that I probably will.
My underlying theory of my normal ‘haul my laptop with me’ behaviour is something like this. Somewhere along the line, I ended up with a skewed value system that tends to prioritize professional responsibilities ahead of almost everything else. I don’t think that this is unusual and in some ways I think that you can get away with this while you’re carefree and single. But I’ve had a nagging feeling since I became a father that this was a problem, and was causing me to miss out on special moments and memories. So I’m trying to be better at this. I definitely fall off the wagon from time to time, but I at least recognize that sometimes the laptop needs to stay home.
That’s not to say that I travelled disconnected or went off the grid. I think that we have more tablets in my house than we have people. But I’m terrible at tapping out nuanced, informative emails when I’m on a smaller device (damn these bass playing fingers !) and I generally just don’t even try. By not taking a laptop and relying on a smartphone I would, by my standards at least, be disconnected. In fact, there’s a big gap in my sent emails where I managed to not send anything for consecutive days on end. I can’t remember the last time that this happened.
So, with some trepidation, I took my bold step towards actually doing what I should be doing on vacation, and hoped that the universe would be benevolent and that the office would still be standing when I got back. My colleagues, understanding that I wouldn’t be responsive, strategically removed me from email threads. And into this void I leaped … and spent time with my family.
And I, in as much as any father-of-a-five-year-old can at Disney, had an okay kind of time. I paid more attention to the world around me. I stayed off Twitter during the day. LinkedIn updates came and went unnoticed. Facebook posts went unliked. Code sat untouched, nestled snuggly in its editor. Instead I took photos. I went on rides that my thirty-something body isn’t designed for. I sat in a fake honeypot and saw a summary of the life of Pooh Bear. I ate fast food and reconstituted eggs from a hotel buffet. I slept pretty well. I survived the flight back. Sounds like success to me.
My work laptop and I are now reconciled (it got over it pretty quickly). But I’m going to build from this and try and enforce a stricter work / not-work policy going forward.
At least until I get a phone with a keyboard.
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