UNPLUGGED MEANING HOW TO
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Share the address only with the people you really want to stay in touch with while you’re away (like your spouse, house-sitter, or traveling companions). You may find it easier to avoid peeking if you set up a separate account to use during vacations. It’s hard to avoid your work email while you’re on vacation if opening your inbox is the only way you can access certain information or check if there’s a crisis with a key client. This allows you to sincerely set the expectation that you will not be reliably reachable, making it easier to assert control over how much or how often you’ll check in.

Whether it’s a few days at an off-the-grid cabin or a few hours in a wifi-free plane, it’s great to be truly incommunicado for at least some portion of your vacation.

UNPLUGGED MEANING HOW TO

Here’s how to set expectations – and set up technology – to increase the odds that you’ll be able to unwind without unplugging completely. The work of disconnecting begins well before your vacation.

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Setting shared expectations about tech use is especially important if you or your fellow travelers have kids you’re trying to keep offline or off-screen. Agree on when it is and isn’t ok to use your devices – for example, you may agree that it’s fine to read the morning news on your tablet over breakfast, but not ok to check sports scores over dinner. If you’re traveling with friends or family, get clear up front about your technology game plan. What do I and my fellow travelers expect from one another? Your work colleagues aren’t the only ones you need to consider.

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If you use email, social media, or text messaging for a combination of personal and professional conversations, get clear up front about how you’re going to draw the line between what counts as work and what counts as play. So once you know what you want to keep doing-and how much you can stop doing-identify which accounts you’ll stay away from and plan accordingly, setting up vacation messages or alerts as necessary. Which accounts will I disconnect from? It’s easier to disconnect from entire networks or accounts than to ignore work-related correspondence once it hits your radar. (This will focus and constrain your tech use more effectively than making a list of online activities to avoid.) For example, I am using the fantastic app RoadTrippers to organize my family’s itinerary and activities, an Evernote notebook as my personal travel guidebook, Yelp as a travel journal, and Facebook to stay in touch with friends. What do I still want to use technology for while I’m away? Make a list of the specific ways you want to use your phone, tablet or computer while you’re on vacation and limit your tech use to what’s on that list. If the idea of ignoring all your work email fills you with fear, is that because you like to be in touch, or because you really could lose your job if you disconnect? What is the minimum connectivity that will be accepted at your job?

What’s the least amount of work connectivity I can get away with? Understand your office culture and separate your colleagues’ expectations from your own anxiety. Whether you’re planning to disconnect from work completely or simply to keep your work time minimized, you need a clear plan for how you’re going to use your devices while in vacation mode. It will also be essential to draw a clear line between work and personal technology use. In an ideal world, you’d work-proof your devices and online activities so that you could use the phone, computer or internet without coming into contact with any work-related stuff.īut many of us simply aren’t in a position to take completely off-the-grid downtime, so you’ll need to figure out just how disconnected from work you can be so you can appropriately minimize the frequency and duration of your work-related check-ins and trigger each of those check-ins manually (so you won’t be tempted to respond to the ping of each incoming message). That takes a combination of planning, tech tricks, and self-discipline. In fact, you may have a more enjoyable and meaningful vacation by staying connected-as long as you’re staying connected to fun, friends, and family, rather than to work. But that doesn’t have to mean unplugging from the entire internet. Vacations are for unplugging: we all need to escape the daily grind from time to time, after all.

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