We are encouraged to take the alloted days of vacation provided in the terms of our employment. I support that idea but admit that I (along with many other IT professionals) prefer to define vacation as a period of time when being connected to the office is defined by me rather than an administrative clock. A recent eweek.com article asks, "Has the Disconnected Vacation Become Extinct" suggests that 80% of IT workers check in with work while they are on vacation. Here is the kicker in the article:
More and more workers are lately stepping forward and suggesting that being able to unshackle themselves from their PDAs and laptops while on vacation is actually a sign that they're doing their job well.
I contributed to the extinct vacation this summer...but it was on my terms. During the 10 days that I was away from my desk, I logged roughly 32 hours of work...mostly supporting blogs from overseas' student teams and keeping up with email. The first of those two is part of my job and a passion of mine (mission bloggers), the second part (handling email) meant that when I returned to the office I was not swamped with a backlog of email and was able to resume a work pace without the overhead of several hundred emails.
According to the article, "The clear demarcation that once existed between work and personal life has all but dissolved." That is me and I am OK with that. It does bring some pause to ask what happens if one or the other is no longer fun. Can a disconnected vacation be resurrected from the entanglement of today's technology?