iOS only on vacation

I’m starting vacations this weekend, and I always look forward to taking a break from work.

Every year I enjoy time with just an iPad and iPhone. This means much less to carry (my backpack is light as a feather with only an iPad Mini and no large chargers) and no temptation to be distracted by work. I don’t check email at all (and remove work email from my devices), read books instead of websites, and cannot wait for the family time and mental break.

Does anyone else take a complete break from work when travelling?

I guess I’m lucky because my colleagues always respect my vacation time and never bother me.

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Yes, this is, in fact, the purpose of a vacation. It should not be wasted on non-vacation related activities.

A good exercise is to calculate the amount of vacation you have left until retirement. Now match this with your Someday Maybe list of places you’d want to see. Deduct vacation time spent visiting relatives - also very precious time, but draining from the same pool of time that you actually can spend exactly how you choose.

Vacation time is a limited, non-renewable resource. Work time comes in unlimited supply.

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I mostly disconnect from work, especially when I don’t have a choice (i.e., heading to our family spot that has horrible internet). I do find, though, that life is more manageable when I return if I do check in once a day, typically just via email, and quickly address a few things that pop up. If I don’t do that, it diminishes the vacation because I’m so overwhelmed when I get back. In fact, I’ve found that tiny bit of work to be so important that I’m taking a WeBoost cell booster with me this year, to install, and hope it improves the Internet situation.

As far as disconnecting entirely, including for pleasure, no. I get great enjoyment out of technology, and that is part of the fun of vacation for me. I use my camera much more than normal, and find time to load and edit the photos.

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I have never heard of WeBoost. Have you used it anywhere else before?

Yes, I do the same thing. I only bring iPhone and iPad (and Kindle for reading) on vacation. Work MacBook stays at home. I will check in on email a couple of times in a week, but try not to respond unless it is really an emergency.

The other thing I do is to not read any news when I’m on vacation. I turn off all Notifications from News apps and try to avoid any TV or radio news as much as possible. I figure if it is a real breaking news story I need to pay attention to, someone will tell me. This has never happened, so I conclude that most news can safely be ignored.

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Same here. iPad and iPhone only for vacation and family visits.

I have done this many times, and never had a problem with it.

If there are urgent emails or slack messages from work, I can respond to them and direct people to colleagues who are on duty and who can resolve their emergency. That’s the theory. In practice, I don’t even remember that happening.

I just set an out of office message that says I’m off work. Optionally, you can provide an alternate contact in that out of office message, but lately I haven’t even been doing that. My company has a very thorough intranet; colleagues can look me up and see who my manager is, and who my colleagues are.

In 2019, my wife and I took a three-week vacation to Africa, where Internet was intermittent, and it was difficult to find US news. I unplugged for big chunks of that three weeks, and didn’t miss a damn thing!

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I haven’t used one yet. I’ll be installing this one in the next day or two if all goes well, and can report back about how it works. Well, if it doesn’t work, I won’t be able to report back. :crazy_face:

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You guys are fortunate being able to totally disconnect. As a professional, client demands are 24/7/365, so no vacations or holidays. Oh sure, I take them, but sometimes do have to handle urgent matters. My secretary protects me pretty well, lol. Clients are usually respectful of time off, so it hasn’t been too much of a problem.

That said, my iPad is great for keeping up with matters where ever I am. It’s essentially replaced a laptop for me.

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For many years when I worked in IT, I couldn’t have an uninterrupted holiday, as a result I rarely felt rested.

In the last 2 years I worked in IT as our company grew (2011) and onwards, I always totally detach from work. If things go wrong, it shows how important you are to the company and/or how under resourced your company is if they cannot manage without one person for a week or two.

Since I started detaching this, I’ve always returned to work in the right frame of mind and raring to go, and the company got more out of me.

My current company has just introduced unlimited paid leave (with some sensible limits) so if I’m feeling run down, I can take a day off and rest, and since I joined them in 2020, I’ve always been able to work from wherever I wish. A colleague went to visit family in New Zealand (from the UK), had a week of annual leave, worked a week and then had another week of annual leave.

I can’t stress enough how important downtime is.

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Not sure this is the only conclusion to a constant demand. That’s why we have “office hours”. A service can be delivered continously, but it takes a significant team to do so. Being a professional includes not only taking care of clients, but also your infrastructure, your skill set and yourself. Most of us have families with quite a few demands as well :slight_smile:

What are your demands on life? If you want nothing more than to work, then I guess you’re OK, but I’m more of a “work to live” type of person. No judgement in your choices, mind you, I’m simply fascinated over how different viewpoints and decisions shape our lives.

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Office hours. Nice if you can get them. But as an application developer on a small team of programmers and support techs for an enterprise product that involved a lot of PC front-ends and UNIX server back-ends, both in our own data centers and customer-hosted in locations all across the United States, there was plenty of work to go around at all hours of the day and too often weekends. Most of us did what we had to do. (And I survived to reach my retirement. :slightly_smiling_face:)

I was a journalist for most of my career. News breaks any hour of the day or night. When I worked at a daily newspaper, the newsroom was staffed 24x7, so the news was always covered and everybody got time off.

If it was BIG news, sure, I’d come in and get to work. But often the breaking news was medium-sized or small, and I’d let someone else handle it, then follow up during my own working hours.

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