Sherri and I were up in Manchester, Vermont this past weekend. We decided to rent a ski condo this winter thinking that it would be easy to get away each weekend, and we were totally wrong… but we did manage to escape the office and head up around 3:30pm on Friday. As we arrived at the Manchester Bar & Grill for dinner on Friday night (~8pm), the first few flakes of the 12-16″ of snow were beginning to fall…. great skiing was upon us.
As a totally wired/connected guy, I need some time to escape every once in a while. Turning off feels nice. Little did I know, but The New York Times wrote an article that ran today all about this… needing a virtual break. (Kevin Rose, digg founder is not the only one who cannot answer all of this email: Facebook messages, Tweets, text messages, and phone calls…. oh my!)
With some many ways to communicate digitally, it was nice to escape everything without any connectivity (except for the house landline) and hit the slopes… both Saturday and this morning (Sunday) before driving back.
Sherri wrote a posting about how the weekend was from a Herman standpoint, but I wanted to urge everyone who leads a wired lifestyle to switch off every once in a while. Yes, it may create a bit more work when you come back, but being cutoff from the community allows you to think freely, unbothered, and at your own pace.
Here is a tip that I highly recommend you should try if you want to manage your phone calls/text messages even while your connected:
- Turn your mobile phone into silent mode. Only check the phone every hour or even less frequent. You should not be a slave to your communications device. I leave my mobile phone on silent the majority of time and check it at my pace. Should there be a text message or voicemail, I’ll answer it accordingly. If you use a service like SimulScribe, it’ll email you the voicemail (if it’s setup).
This works… trust me.
