No amount of thumbing the tiny track ball through email on my new pink BlackBerry turned up a single mission critical action item.
If we use figures of a seven-day vacation for two, including airfare, hotels, and meals costing $2100, hours awake at 16, then every vacation hour costs $18.75, or about $20 per hour.
A $20 vacation hour spent reading and answering email on the BlackBerry was like sitting still in a taxi with the meter running and not even looking out the window.
As a start-up company leader, creation and connection energize me. Tedious managerial tasks leave me weary. In the latter category, entering data into QuickBooks comes to mind. Doing email on a BlackBerry without access to my creative tools on a laptop - Microsoft Word and TypePad foremost among them - ended up being a tedious managerial task. On vacation, then, I brought the very least invigorating part of my work with me.
Having the Internet in my pocket was a different story.
While I love vacation, I love the people already in my life, too. I missed them while I was gone. “What are you doing?” was the question I most wanted to ask. That answer is on Twitter and my BlackBerry called up my text-based Twitter stream quickly and readily. Since I’m still a slow BlackBerry typist, I didn’t correspond with the people I follow, but I felt very comforted that, while I was missing them, I wasn’t missing everything they were doing.
And Twitter was my one creative outlet. Letting a picture be worth a thousand words, I took a photo or got one taken here and there, mostly blurry - I’ll learn - wanting to share my wild and crazy vacation with people who care - and sent a TwitPic with an inexpertly typed caption. I found it often quite moving to send them. More than the “Wish you were here” postcard sentiment, I was feeling, “Oh, l so want to share this with you.”
To find out how Lance Armstrong was doing in the Tour de France, did I access the slow-loading, vacation-minute-dollars-are-ticking-away Versus.com? Nope, I called up Lance’s Twitter stream and found out from him myself.
“Where is that restaurant/theater/hotel/museum?” Google. 'Nough said.
My last vacation was two years ago and the next may well be two years from now. While I understand that founding a company assigned me the fiduciary responsibility of being available to it 24-7 - I can’t sometimes lead a company, and sometimes not lead it - for my next vacation, I will leave these words in my email auto-responder:
"Call me."
Subscribe to the feed
Comments