How to make the most of your summer vacation

Summertime is vacation season. The weather is wonderful, the warm days are conducive to taking a break and getting away for a week or two. Plus, it is often easier for families with children to get away when school is not in session.

Vacations from work are not only fun, they’re also important. They are a chance to reconnect with family or friends. They’re also a way to get a break and reset.

Because vacations are important, it is useful to think about what you’re trying to get out of them, so that you plan them appropriately.

A vacation or a trip?

I like to distinguish between two kinds of getaways: vacations and trips. A vacation is focused on relaxation. The most difficult choices on a vacation should be where to eat, and whether to read by the pool or the ocean. A trip is busy. You’re there to see new things, meet new people, and explore the world.

Both vacations and trips can be rewarding. Vacations provide a true oasis from a packed daily life. The aim is to sleep late, relax, catch up on pleasure reading, and enjoy a slower pace. Vacations are most valuable when the fast pace of life has gotten to you. If you’re living a life when every minute is scheduled, then a vacation can remind you that time spent without an agenda has its benefits. It is also useful when you feel like you’re always living on the edge of exhaustion.

Trips are opportunities to create memories of experiences. They require a lot of advance planning in order to decide exactly where to go and what to do. Just about every day of a trip involves an itinerary in order to maximize what you get out of the place you’re visiting. Indeed, many trips are a little stressful while you’re on them, but they reward you with memories that you can look back on for a lifetime.

Another value of both vacations and trips is that they can slow time down. You have probably noticed that when you’re engaged in your normal routine that the days and weeks fly by. That is because your brain is able to predict what is going to happen next, so it doesn’t need to store a lot of new information. As a result, the moments go quickly as they are happening, and they don’t leave a lot of information behind, so they don’t seem that long even when you look back on them.

When you break up your routine, the days feel like they slow down, because your brain doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen next. Plus, if you are visiting a new place, you have lots of new memories to create, which makes the time feel long when you look back on it as well.

Plan to connect

Your relationships can suffer during the normal course of life. Running from one thing to the next means that you may not spend as much quality time with your partner as you should. You may miss out on time with children, parents, or friends.

As you plan a vacation, think about people you need to connect with and how to use your break to renew these connections. If you have family or friends that live far away from you, consider spending some of your vacation  with them. Those moments of reconnection help to refresh relationships that are hard to maintain just with email, calls, and social media. Those visits will also help to create continuity between your life now and your past, which gives you a greater sense of coherence to your life story. That can help you to feel more grounded.

Plan to disconnect

If you’re going to take a vacation, you should also use that time to disconnect from work. One question you need to ask is how long you can go away before you will feel like you need to check in on work. For example, in my role, I find it easy to disconnect from work for a week, but if I were to go away for longer than that, I would feel like I need to check in on decisions that may require my attention. As a result, I tend to go away once toward the beginning of the summer and a second time toward the end rather than taking a single two-week vacation.

It is important to really get away from your work. If you check your email every day while you’re away, then part of you is being dragged into the context of work on a daily basis. You may not be physically present at work, but mentally you haven’t gotten the distance you need. By leaving work behind for the duration of your vacation, you create the conditions to feel refreshed and ready to return when the vacation is over.

In order to make this work, you also need to ensure that tasks that normally require your input can either be held until your return or that someone else can step in to address your responsibilities in your absence. Make sure you train people to do your job, so that you can leave without having to worry that things will fall apart while you’re away. That means you may need to start getting people at work ready now for your absence—even if your trip is weeks away.