>> Make Your Next Vacation a True Vacation

The best rule for making a vacation a true vacation is to have no e-mail or telephone communication with the office at all. That forces co-workers to develop new ways to handle issues that otherwise would come to your attention, and that's healthy all the way around. If that is impossible, it can work to have one hour per day devoted to an office check-in with a rule that the time spent on office matters can never go beyond that, no matter what.

Most people are aware of the problem with checking in with the office. People need to pay more attention to the other ways in which they bring their regular routines with them when they go on vacation. One big one for me was reading newspapers. There was a time when the first thing I would do on each of my vacation days was to go looking for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Let that go, and you can open up close to two hours per day of recharge time.

The key is breaking your routine. The older we get, the more drawn we are to sticking to a routine. The recharge comes from resisting that urge. You should not be reading the newspaper at the beach. You should be reading poetry, if you never read poetry. Or taking a long walk, if you never take long walks. Or talking to your spouse, if you rarely have time for long talks with your spouse. Or building a sand castle with your kids. Or flying a kite.

You should be eating foods that you don't usually eat. You should be going to sleep at a different time and waking up at a different time. You must be spending a good bit of your time doing things you would never do at home. That's the recharge.

I gave up television some years ago. I watch television on vacation. It wouldn't be a recharge for most others, but it is for me because watching television is an out-of-the-norm experience for me today. The show I most missed when I gave up television was "Law and Order." On last year's vacation, I discovered a station that plays "Law and Order" reruns for several hours every night. I was able to watch three or four of them that week without it getting old because it had been such a long time between "Law and Order" viewings for me.

Vacation time is recreation time. The idea is to "re-create" your life. If you come home with a plan to do one thing in your regular life in a new way, it was likely a good value proposition for you to spend the money it took to arrange to take that time away from your normal routine.