“A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking.” -Earl Wilson
If you are actually working hard, you expend a tremendous amount of mental and emotional energy. It drains your battery, and rest is meant to recharge.
But what if you only recharge your battery to 90% of where it was the previous week, because of kids or parents or other stuff going on outside of work? 90% of your full mental and emotional capacity is good, but next week you are at 81% to start. Still in the green if you were a phone. But then it is 73% the next week. Then 66%. Then 59%. Maybe you’re starting to drag and lag. Another month of this insufficient recharge and you are at 39%. The decline has slowed down because you are operating at barely a third of your capacity but you keep pushing through because it’s got to be done and you’re the only one who can do it.
Another month? At a quarter of capacity. You are starting to snap at people because you have no more tolerance. You are dragging yourself out of bed after hitting the snooze alarm twice because even an extra five minutes of restless sleep might make a little difference. Your workouts feel like crap and that’s how you’re now eating because a momentary sugar rush staves off the lethargy for fifteen-minute bursts of productivity that are becoming less frequent.
You need to get away. A long weekend where you aren’t overwhelmed with the personal side of things (which rarely happens) will reset your charge by a full month, and that might be enough to get you through to the vacation.
A vacation is not sitting there ruminating on work. It is literally putting yourself into Airplane Mode with no Wi-Fi and letting yourself recharge because nothing is draining the battery while it replenishes. If you don’t do this often enough, your battery will never recover.
