Never the Twain Shall Meet – Vacation and Work in the Electronic Age!

Vacations are vacations, and work is work. Right? Wrong!

The Electronic Age has changed not only the way we work, but also the way we vacate. Many commentators have portrayed it as the ruination of our vacations and an intruder into every facet of our lives. Perhaps some features of the Electronic Age will lead to that conclusion. The cellular telephone, and now the smartphone, come to mind, both of which attempt to command your attention at the most inconvenient times.

However, the Electronic Age need not necessarily be the pestilence of the vacation. It can, properly managed, be a tremendous tool in our quest to keep up with our jobs and the world.

Email is inherently that tool. Email need not be responded to at the instant it is sent. Email must await connection to the Internet, which is, of course, under your control. Email need not be responded to at all. We have the luxury to peruse incoming emails and decide which of them are of sufficient urgency to respond to immediately, and which of them are not of sufficient urgency (which will be most of them, fortunately, taking into account the importance of family and vacations) to save on the notebook hard drive to respond to later.

All right, you are now saying to yourself, “Why would I interrupt my vacation for any work-related matter?” If that is the case (and you are earning enough money), I can only congratulate you. For the rest of us, there are always matters pending, as we walk out the door for vacation that will leave us sleepless, if something comes up while we are vacating that requires our special attention, and we are out of contact.

Voila . . . email! Here is a technology that enables us to screen for these critical work matters at our convenience and allows us to respond immediately to those (hopefully) few matters that absolutely require our individual and immediate attention. The purpose of this article is not to clutter up your next vacation with electronic noise, but to give you the tool to manage your vacation in the context of the ever-increasing work speeds and loads.

Leave your cellphone off, however. Cellphones demand attention, when on, and it is a rare person who can not answer. Unless you dump everything immediately into voicemail, you cannot screen out the critical matters from the other matters at your own convenience. If you need to respond to a critical matter sent to you by email or voicemail, you can merely call from anywhere in the world using an international cellphone, or a prepaid cellphone procured at your destination, or worst case, a landline telephone and credit card, should you absolutely, positively need to immediately contact someone about a work-related or other important matter.

How often you check your email on vacation is up to you. How often you answer your cellphone is probably not up to you. Turn off your cellphone . . . better yet . . . don’t even take it! Rely instead upon the email features of either your notebook computer with modem, the hotel’s business center, or the local cyber café down the block in the town of your vacation dreams.

Beality