Sunday Best: Embrace Every Vacation Moment

You've just returned from a summertime family adventure. Sure, the exhaustion is real, but your social media timeline is ripe with photos and laugh emojis making it all very worthwhile. On the negative side, you have piles of laundry littered about. On the positive, last night you slept in your own bed for the first time in about a week.

Your return to work is in less than 24 hours. The kids start school in two weeks. The holiday season begins in three months! Panic is creeping in...but wait.

Stop the avalanche of all the thoughts. You are still on vacation. Keep rolling around in these moments of away. These moments are so precious.

If you have a hard time staying detached the final day, here are a few simple ways to keep your mind focused where it belongs - on the personal-side you.

Focus on the mundane

If you think for one minute you don't have anything to focus on aside from jumping back into work tomorrow, think small and think again. Start laundry, bake cookies, meal prep, hop on the treadmill. These last moments of vacation are not only yours, they're precious. These are the moments that fuel your next professional sprint.

We returned from Disney World late yesterday afternoon and the evening was a slippery slide to bedtime. The haziness was real. We are collectively all-caps exhausted. This morning I awoke thinking of how to tackle tomorrow morning in the office - a big system implementation, staffing needs, internal transitions and migrations - until suddenly and jarringly I shut all that down. I forced myself to think about the tragically ripe bananas in the kitchen and hopped up and made banana bread. My daughter wandered in and helped. She then requested French toast. Done. I started some laundry. I lightly unpacked. It might rain later. Great - might be a perfect time to have a cup of hot tea. Today will be a hopscotch of sporadic non-work mundane tasks - and I'll enjoy every minute.

When you start to overthink or you catch your mind lazily circling around to work tomorrow morning, find a home task and get it done. Work comes soon enough.

Revisit your holiday activities

Of course I needed to send a tally of charges to some family members for them to Venmo me promptly. They'll do the same. I want to wrap up this vacation today. But I found as I went through the charges, I remembered the faces of my family members - one seeing Cinderella's castle for the first time, another hitting a middle age birthday and getting a big embarrassing celebratory hug from Pluto, a cousin re-enacting the twirlers during an unexpected street parade and my whole immediate family's joy after riding the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride.

These are the days. We have one ride on this marble and every second is a second to relish. For the rest of the day I will vividly recall all the times we had - fun-to-stressful - and appreciate them, replay them, smile. These will be memories we carry with us for a long time and today's a great day to start the trend of leaning on memories.

Core memories are future fuel. They empower you to refocus when you find yourself in work weeds, they pull you through challenges and deliver immediate positivity when you are leaning into the negative.

Choose one big-to-you change

For whatever reason, I walked away from this vacation choosing to cancel my audiobook membership.

It all started a few months ago when I followed a friend on Facebook as she chronicled her book goals for this year. After completing each book, she shared a selfie while holding her copy of the book. I recall judging it silently thinking, My books are all neatly stored in Audible.

Oddly, right before this vacation, I found myself purchasing a physical book for the plane ride. I need to read some classics, I thought. So I bought one. A physical book! How novel! (pun intended)

How I loved pulling a copy of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express out of my bag and reading it on the plane, by the resort pool, at night to make my eyes sleepy. I didn't read a ton, but I read with full focus and no glare.

One day at the pool I realized I have a pile of audio books that I've been listening to sporadically, but never finishing. I'm pretty sure I read an article once about some super-effective business person that was reading a dozen books at once. Is this why I've been stringing these books along? To mimic someone else? It's not only not working for me, it's just not me.

As a technology leader, there are always numerous high-profile projects spinning at once. Juggling them can be a challenge - especially to completion - but it's an endless priority. Condensing numerous projects into one priority is part of what professional-me does.

A big change for personal-me is going to be refining focus. Less everything, more what's important. I'm canceling my audiobook membership and keeping it simple - one book at a time. Why? Mostly it's because why not? I've got two kids - a high schooler and a middle schooler - and, the way I see it, if anything is going to be an everything in my personal life, it will be them. So I will shed the fifty books, and keep it simplest. We'll see if there's any impact.

As an aside, your big-to-you change doesn't need to be big to anyone else. Somewhere, someone has fought their way through this writing and is thinking how dumb my big-to-me change is. To that, I simply shrug.

My Sunday best on time off and re-entry

Leadership is hard work. It's strategy, it's moving forward, it's engaging numerous wildly different people carrying wildly different deep-rooted goals, preferences and triggers. While juggling those responsibilities is an exciting challenge, it's also stressful. Our time away needs to be just that - time away. Mind, body, spirit time away. Every. Single. Second.

On vacation - yes, we recharge and refresh. But also, yes we revisit. We revisit our professional how's, when's and why's. We reenter with fresh eyes, clear minds and new ways to tackle in-flight projects. Without those fresh, all-in experiences, we stagnate. So enjoy every second of time off moments - they strengthen the very fabric of your being and your place of work will be stronger for your dedication to detaching.

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