I’m writing this in a notebook with a pen instead of in Markdown. This isn’t my usual setup with a desk chair and a standing desk. I’m sitting on a wooden chair at a table from another century.
I’m on vacation :). I usually take advantage of the time and mental space that come with not having to work to make progress on side projects, catch up on blogs, and so on. And I genuinely enjoy it: waking up late, opening my laptop at any time, making myself a coffee, and aimlessly working on that project I abandoned a month ago because I didn’t have the energy to keep pushing it forward.
But this time I made a different choice. I deliberately left my laptop at home while staying in a coastal town in southern Spain. It felt… strange. I wanted to force myself to disconnect and see how I reacted.
First of all, I haven’t disconnected completely. I’m writing these lines, so I’m already thinking about the same things again. Unless I spend the whole day sightseeing, I naturally start thinking about software. I open YouTube or check my email, and software is there too. I’m not obsessed (I think) with disconnecting completely, but after this experiment I’d like to go a little further next time. Maybe I’ll switch to a phone without social media or stay completely offline.
In any case, during the first few days I found myself missing it. Not having a PC nearby didn’t bother me, but I suppose some dopamine-driven habits were still there. I missed simple things: opening Chrome and YouTube, or that moment of focus when I open VS Code for the first time that day.
The other thing that bothered me was the feeling that I wasn’t making good use of my time. It only got stronger as the days passed. It’s an unpleasant feeling: you go on vacation, and if you rest and disconnect completely, you feel bad because you’re not making progress on the things you usually don’t have the energy for. But if you do work on them, you also feel like you’re not fully switching off. I also realized that it’s okay to read that Addy Osmani post two weeks later or not try the latest Claude Code feature.
The truth is that I find it much harder to “make myself” work on these side projects after a workday than while I’m on vacation. But I don’t know how healthy it is to impose these kinds of tasks on myself when I should be resting, so this time I decided to let go. And… I think it was the right decision.
Maybe I need to shift my perspective and stop expecting to make so much progress during vacations, and instead try to spread that work more evenly throughout my normal working weeks. But procrastination makes that much harder.
I’m writing these final lines now that I’m back at work :_). Looking back after a couple of weeks, a few things have become clear:
- I’ve barely made any progress on my side projects this summer, unlike in previous years.
- I need to work on not feeling bad about that.
- Procrastination is still an enemy of mine. I need to find a way for this “work” to feel less like work and more like a hobby.
- Disconnecting has made me want to work on these projects again. Coming back with my batteries recharged gave me enough energy to wrap up one, move another forward, and start a new one.
- Next time, I’ll try to disconnect even more radically.
Thanks for reading :)