Hard Boot

I am about four hours from a flight to 115-degree temperatures and this is me saying goodbye to my laptop. For now.

• If I take my laptop, I will be tempted to “just check on a few things”.
• If I take my laptop, I will get sucked into work stuff, when I am patently out of office.
• If I take my laptop, I will sabotage this effort to unplug.

I know what happens when I take my laptop. I also know what happens when I do not: I come back more present, refreshed, etc. The lie I tell myself every time I take my laptop is that it’s just so I can be occupied on the plane. Or clear out my email the night before I return. Or “just in case”.

• I do not work in any field that has 24/7 responsibility that ultimately rests on me alone: there are others who rotate through that responsibility and in this particular case it’s not my turn.
• I do not work in any field where lives are at stake.
• I do not work in any field where there is the expectation of total availability even when out of office (with plenty of notice, brandished in automated replies, and signified by a little purple-grey mark in Teams).

Yet every time I try to take time off, I delude myself or sabotage it and have to do things like get on a plane and fly a thousand miles away from my laptop, having disconnected apps from my phone, and, in other words, set some very hard boundaries. I do not have the discipline in this area (I promise I have it in others).

“It’s just going to be a little crazy for the next 6 months, but then it should ease up”, I have said, pretty much every month, for the last 3 years. The crazy will not stop – there will always be surprise meetings, and curveballs, and organizational “pivots”, and People Very Worried About Things, and as long as I am employed in the arena I am employed in, that will not change.

Before I leave for most vacations, I scurry around the house and clean All the Things. All the laundry, all the bathrooms, all the vacuuming, all the dusting, etc. — because I guess Architectural Digest will be dropping by in my absence and it’s Important That Things Are Ready. I do this with work too: I go update my documentation, I leave notes on who to talk to for what, I remind folks, I have recordings, etc.

Not once has my ability to (or failure to) make my bed before a trip helped (or hindered) anything. While I’m certain that folks do read the out of office reply (at least the first line that contains the most critical information: you will not be hearing from me for a bit) are “helped” by it, I’m equally certain that they’d still get unblocked sooner or later because nothing I write in terms of who to go to in my absence is a surprise. All of this frenetic effort before I can unplug is NOT for them, it’s for me. It’s a reassurance that I did everything I could to leave it easier for others because somehow that is how I should think about my time off. Which is weird, if you think about it: the whole point to time off, is to do something for yourself.

So, this is me doing it: farewell, laptop. See you in a few days.