My friend said that she was in desperate need of a vacation. Ok and hmmm. I think the need to “get away” - at least for me - is not an issue of leaving town; it’s recalculating how I see and respond to reality. I think it’s safe to say that we are all tired and spent, and sometimes it feels as if we are meeting ourselves going; hence the need to get away. (I don’t know about you, but my vacations usually leave me more exhausted than when I started out.)
The phrase “work smarter, not harder” for some reason pops into my mind and a couple of examples come to mind. When I ran a restaurant, I would always say to the servers that when delivering food to a table, you should always return to the kitchen with dirty dishes - be efficient. Quint used to say that hourly rounding in nursing would immediately cut down the need for call lights - when we started the hourly rounding project in 2007 we saw a 76% reduction in use of call lights. Consistency and practices that anticipate future work or interruptions are good practices to employ.
I’m not saying that we need less time off - but for the parents out there (who are 100% busy all the time) and those of us who plan vacations that exhaust us … perhaps looking at our daily activities and inserting a little more “me” time, or reworking our work to include practices that are more efficient and make our jobs easier would pay off*. Next week is my year anniversary of daily meditating - every single morning for 20 to 30 minutes - I think it’s helped.
*In our fresh eyes committee (a committee made up of new employees to give us ideas on how and what we can do to improve -- sometimes we don’t see the problems because we’ve looked at them too long) several ideas were put into place by people who saw the situation differently. These ideas saved time and resources, and probably reduced general anxiety. YAY!!
