Establish distinct limits. Our personal lives frequently overlap with our business life, causing us to check emails or texts while with family or make calls while taking a walk. While this isn’t incorrect, it prevents you from fully appreciating your vacation time. Setting clear boundaries, such as saying, “I’m cutting off at 6 p.m. or that I don’t work on weekends except for 30 minutes of email in the morning,” might be helpful. Because of my decision to take June and December off motivated by my work with my coach, I can clearly see that this is a non-work space now that I’ve entered the month of absence. That does not preclude me from working in the future, but I have entered this phase. Reduce your speed. We barely have time to breathe as we race from one job to the next, one message to the next, throughout our lives. Imagine what it would be like to truly relax and take it leisurely, if only during our vacation time. By the way, we can apply the same way of thinking at work as well, but that isn’t the topic of this post. Thus, take a moment to relax, slow down, and breathe. Live in the now. We rarely allow ourselves to have deliberate space for ourselves since we are constantly worrying about the things we aren’t getting done. Our brains will naturally begin to think about a great deal of things we aren’t doing.
