There are days that I wake up, eat breakfast, and start my day without complaint. I feel like I can conquer the world (or at least my list of To-Do’s). I know what my personal mission is and I diligently work on molding my life into that goal. Those days are awesome and I think of them as Plan A – the ideal day.

But…what happens on days that the alarm goes off and I roll over and groan? I want to pull the covers over my head and hide from my day. It may have been that the baby has kept me up at night, or I am sore from a work-out, or it’s just that it’s cloudy and cold and getting out of a warm bed is just too much to ask. On those days I need to have a Plan B.

My Plan B is to go ahead and groan…I don’t pretend that things are perfect. But then I get over it. I get out of bed, shower and put my clothes on. Nine times out of ten that is all I need to kick-start my day and I feel back to normal after that and can go back to Plan A. But sometimes I’m still dragging and continue on with my Plan B. I realize that I need to take care of myself on those days more then ever, because pushing myself when I’m exhausted will only make things worse. So my plan of attack is to work for 45 minutes and sit and rest for 15 minutes. I actually use a timer, which helps me stay focused and gives me permission to sit down when the 45 minutes is up. For those 15 minutes I might check my email, read a book or magazine, drink some coffee, or lay down for a cat nap. Then when the 15 minutes is up, I start over again. I find that those 15 minutes of rest every hour is really restorative and is just enough to keep me going. Usually at the end of the day I find that I have accomplished a lot, and I have been good to myself during the process. That allows me to be good to those around me. And for that my family thanks me because I am not so grouchy!

I’m on vacation. Vacation is a good thing–a really good thing. I’ve noticed that it is something that many of us Americans are not all that good at. Europeans seem to have perfected the art of vacation. They really unplug and get away and leave work. In some countries, the whole country seems to shut down and take a collective sigh. Everyone is off on holidays so no one expects much and work actually slows down.

At my office this summer, we kept waiting for it to slow down. Isn’t it supposed to slow down in the summer? Didn’t it used to slow down in the summer? Why doesn’t it slow down in the summer? I don’t know the answer to the why it doesn’t but I am convinced that it should. We need a season of rest. It’s just like the idea of a weekly Sabbath or leaving the land fallow every few years. We need some fallow time in our busy schedules just to let things be for awhile.

So, I am relaxing and hanging out with family and friends for 2 weeks. It is wonderful. I get to feeling guilty every now and then about the work piling up…about deadlines that are not being met…and just about that uncomfortable feeling of not accomplishing anything for a few days. But I am resisting the draw of pulling into work. And I am practicing unplugging from the daily routine.

In this day of iPhones and Blackberries and laptops and gizmos of all sorts to keep us connected, getting truly unconnected from work is a bigger challenge. But it is worth doing. Not because we accomplish anything by taking a vacation. Exactly the opposite. For our own good, we need to occasionally accomplish absolutely nothing.

David Dahlin