One of the benefits of owning and operating your own business is that you can often take your work with you when you go out of town for a vacation. While that is certainly a good thing, it is important to have reasonable expectations about how much work you will be able to get done while you are on the go. For the past few days, I have been traveling with my family. We still have a few more days of vacation left, and I have not been able to do as much work as I thought that I would be able to do.
I am not sure why I thought that I would be able to devote my usual two to three hours to work each day for the duration of our trip. If it were a simple vacation to a location a few hours from our home for a leisurely vacation, that may have been a reasonable expectation. However, this trip is not exactly a simple vacation. My sister’s wedding was today, and our vacation is a road trip from Vermont to Florida to attend the wedding. The first couple of days of the trip were a blur, with my dad and my husband driving in shifts, including driving through the night. We did stop at a hotel so that people could rest, but I was not able to rest or work because the kids were not sleepy –they had slept during their usual times while we were on the road. After we arrived, there was much to do in preparation for the wedding, so no real time to get work done there either.
The wedding was earlier this evening and it was fantastic. We had a wonderful time, and somehow I have energy left over to get some work done. Part of my work this evening will consist of making a schedule for myself for the remainder of vacation as well as the rest of the month so that I can plan out my work in a more organized way. This vacation is just the beginning of a very busy November at my house. With my son’s third birthday, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday all around the corner it is important that I figure out what work I will do on which days. It is even more important that I be realistic about when to schedule my work, because even though I still have plenty of time to get all of my work done this month I feel badly about not having stuck to the vacation work schedule that I had created for myself.
Photo by pixelperfectstock.com.