The Importance of Vacation
Posted by Anthony
I'm currently in Wildwood, NJ spending some quality time with my family and fiancée. Wildwood is a beach town, and is one of the rare ones left that doesn't have corporate names splattered everywhere, paid beaches and chain hotels. It's a town that's forever stuck in the 50s - in a good way. From the style of the buildings to the vibe in general, you feel removed from the fast-paced nature of modern society.
Ah yes, modern society. Where workaholics are revered, and vacation days are frowned upon. Why is this? What cosmic shift has occurred that has given everyone the notion that the more we constantly work, the more productive, creative and innovative we are? It's a fallacy.
Businesses should strongly encourage vacation time, not honor those who underutilize it. Periods of vacation have historially lead to some of my best ideas and shifts in mindsets. I've read books that have changed the way I do everything from organizing my daily schedule to planning my future. I've explored concepts that lead to groundbreaking initiaitves, such as my first forray into Amazon EC2 and "cloud technologies" a few years back. And more generally, I come back from vacation with a new perspective on who I am, what I do and why I do it. It's not just a reset button; it's a stop, re-program, and re-start routine -- one that fundamentally improves the work I do and makes me more productive for months after returning. That's a week well invested, in my opinion.
With all of that in mind, Cheyne and I are now trying to organize working vacations approximately two times per year. A working vacation means that we go somewhere remote for about a week, and use that week to get a good chunk of key projects and initiatives completed. Our first such working vacation was May of this year, when we used Homeaway.com to rent a full house just a few miles off the Las Vegas strip. Cheyne used a few of the days to meet with clients at a major industry trade show on the strip, and we used the rest of the time to simply work out of the house - strategizing, collaborating, and hammering away at the type of work we'd previously be too bogged down to devote mindshare to. At least 25% of DistiSuite 2.0 is a result of that week.
A working vacation accomplishes two main goals for us:
- Provides a change of scenery, and a welcome break from the mundane
- Forces us to finish any reactive tasks the week before in preparation for doing some more proactive work the week following. There's nothing quite like an expensive trip and a physical displacement; it forces you to finish what you were doing and focus on the reason you're leaving
Fact is, whether it's a normal vacation or a working vacation, you need to be doing something - especially if you own a small business - to break from the chains of your daily workflow. You need to constantly re-program so that you remain creative, innovative and interested in what you do. And ironically, there's no greater way to do that than to put aside what you do on a daily basis for just one week, and focus on the bigger picture - or maybe on nothing at all.
A Long Time Coming
Posted by Anthony
I'm baaack...
It's a bit shameful that it's been so long since my last post, but I'm going to do my best to make sure that doesn't happen again. To be (somewhat) fair, there has been a lot of going on these last few months. In chronological order:
- Xonatek participated in the completion of a mammoth project for one of its more noteworthy clients, House Party. We helped rebuild the backend of the site from the ground up, pushed and pulled on the scaling limits of CakePHP and MySQL, and learned a whole lot about our trade and ourselves in the process.
- I proposed to Donna, my girlfriend of three years, and she happily said yes. To think about where I was before I met her, how I grew and matured once I did, and where we are, together, now -- well, the changes are mind-boggling, frankly. We are now beginning to go through the grueling yet joyful process of planning our wedding, which will in all likelihood be taking place sometime in September of 2012.
For the first time in my life, I went on a (much needed!) cruise. Donna and I set sail from New York for 9 days on the Caribbean Princess and had a great time. Highlights included sightseeing (and visiting the local bars!) in Old San Juan, and snorkeling amongst the turtles in St Thomas.- After a couple years of customer feedback and many months of hard work, we released DistiSuite version 2.0 with overwhelming success. Not only is our service much better for it, but we learned a lot in the process about how to successfully deploy large scale changes to a traffic-heavy web application with minimal downtime & errors, and seamless rollback capability in case things go wrong. No easy feat.
- DistiSuite finished integrating its web marketing service with a prominent inventory software provider in the industry. This will allow our customers to automatically syncronize inventory items, orders, and quote requests between their customer-facing website and the software they use to run their business. After a year of highs and lows with this project, we are looking forward to offering clients easier & more effective ways to use our services.
As you can see, it's been quite a long few months of busy progression, from both a personal and business standpoint. Most milestones above are just just that - closed chapters in ongoing stories. As these stories progress, I'll be sure to keep everyone posted. I look forward to staying in touch. Until next time, internet...
- Anthony