Let's have a productive and refreshing vacation

Having a long holiday or a vacation is blessing; it's even more so if we can make it 'joyful and productive'. How so? Dorie Clark argues that 'a productive vacation' is more desirable. Read her article and find out how and why.

"How to Take a Productive Yet Refreshing Vacation"

Dorie Clark, JUNE 04, 2015

Some people will bristle at the seemingly oxymoronic notion of a “productive vacation.” But as an entrepreneur for the past decade, if I’m going to take a vacation at all, it needs to be productive — otherwise, without the safety net of paid vacation days and coworkers to cover for me, I might as well keep working. That’s not to say I don’t take lengthy, enjoyable vacations; I previously wrote for HBR about my month-long, unplugged sojourn traveling in India. But we all have limited time off, so we have to choose wisely. Here’s how I balance having a productive yet refreshing vacation.

Define success upfront. Some might ask: Why should you define a successful vacation? Isn’t just relaxing enough? Maybe. But as an executive or entrepreneur, you probably have success metrics in most other areas of your life. You know the sales target you need to hit, and how much you need to raise for the charity board you’re involved with, and you may even have personal success goals, like having dinner with your family every night. Especially if you’re trapped in the typical American situation of only two weeks’ vacation per year — much of which we don’t take — it pays to know upfront what success looks like in a vacation, so you don’t end up frittering away limited time. Your goal may be to reconnect with your spouse, spend quality time with your kids, catch up on reading, kickstart a new fitness regimen, make progress on a novel you’re writing, or literally just vegetate. Any of those are worthy goals, but they should be articulated upfront so you can prioritize them.

Choose a destination that does double duty. A few years back, I was dating someone who desperately wanted to go to Hawaii. Her perfect vision was a cabin in Kauai, reading and painting on the beach. That sounds great, but at that point in my career, having just finished writing my first book, Reinventing You, I didn’t need a quiet retreat — I needed to be networking. So we went to her other favorite destination, Paris, where (out of a two-week vacation) I could spend a half-day in business meetings at HEC-Paris, which rendered part of our vacation tax-deductible and led to a teaching contract.

YOU AND YOUR TEAM

Vacation: Make the most of your time away.

Make time to rekindle old connections. It’s impossible to cordon off “work” and “life.” We experience the downside of these blurred lines every day, as coworkers and clients assume we’re reachable 24/7 thanks to our smartphones. We might as well leverage the upside by building real, meaningful, gratifying relationships with our business contacts while we’re away from the office. I just spent the last 3 ½ weeks traveling the country, giving talks at bookstores and corporations to launch my new book. But in between, I made sure to load up my schedule with dinners and coffees with friends — and by “friends,” I often mean current or potential business contacts whom I enjoy spending time with. In the past week alone, I’ve dined with a podcaster who’s had me on his show, a former boss from 15 years ago who now runs a large nonprofit, a woman I profiled in Stand Out, and a business owner who hosted the San Francisco launch party for my first book. I had a blast, and reignited dormant ties, which is one strategy for maximizing the value of your vacation.

Vacation time is meant to be refreshing, so you can arrive back at work with renewed vigor. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also be productive, cementing important connections, meeting people in strategic new locations, and achieving the goals that are most important to you.

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out.

Source: https://hbr.org/2015/06/how-to-take-a-productive-yet-refreshing-vacation

Questions

1.       According to Dorie Clark, is it possible to be productive when you are on vacation?

2.       What are some of the things we can do when we have a vacation?

3.       What is the first thing we should do to make our vacation ‘productive’?

4.       Why did the author (Dorie Clark) choose Paris instead of Hawaii for her vacation?

What does