This holiday was the first break that I had taken from work in a while. At first it felt very weird to be waking up and ignoring my to do list. I honestly struggled to stop and rest. I only ever ended up in this weird middle ground where it was just low level worry about what I should be doing without fully disconnecting.

The issue that I am experiencing now is that I am sort of still stuck in that middle ground of being unproductive but “busy”. The difficulty that I have had with transition to and from rest has reminded me about the law of interia.

Inertia

“An object in motion will remain in motion and an object at rest will remain at rest, unless acted upon by a force.”

The holidays snuck up on me this year and I did not do any preparation for the rest that I was going to be having over the holiday. Without this preparation I was just trusting that I could abruptly change states and do so well. Likewise, I did not prepare a way to transition back into to work. Obviously this did not work out for me.

I would assume that I would need to prepare and plan a force on either side of the break to help me change states more effectively.

This week I am mainly interested in hearing from you. What are some ways that you are able to turn off and back on successfully? Have you developed any practices to help prepare for these transitions? I would truly love to hear any tips that you may have.

Find of the week - OpenPhone

I have used a couple other services like this, they are usually over priced and have a bad user experience.

I did the trial for OpenPhone and it is great in every way. For $10/month you get an alternate number that has voicemail, text and calling on both desktop and mobile. If you have a larger you can also assign multiple users to the same phone number.

I will not be using OpenPhone yet, as the majority of my calls happen through zoom. If we start getting a lot of inbound calls its something I will be using for sure.