I’ve taken the last couple of weeks off of work. The break was very necessary, but I didn’t really understand why until the last day or so.
I’ve felt extremely overwhelmed in life. Work was suffering. I was snapping at my family. My body physically hurt. It wasn’t good.
I’m working on being more deliberate in all kinds of things: how I spend my time, what I eat, even what I’m going to spend my attention on.
Today I took a small step and put my phone out of reach when I was home. Left it in the kitchen.
During my vacation, I noticed that I still felt strangely overwhelmed – despite turning Slack and email notifications off. Despite no meetings. Despite intentionally not talking or even thinking about work.
I also noticed that I spent a lot of time looking at my phone while on vacation. There’s a lot more free time on vacation. And I noticed that I started spending it looking at my phone. Twitter. Online news. Reddit. Instagram.
Literally nothing of value. And with the outcome of distraction and some feeling of being overwhelmed. What the hell?
So today, my phone wasn’t in my pocket. The most noticeable outcome of this is that I sometimes just sat there with nothing to do. So I would actually watch what was going on. Wife cooking dinner. Kid playing with cars. The rain outside.
Just not having that little screen in my pocket, nagging me, giving me something to do instead of sit with my thoughts. It made so much difference. Unexpectedly.