Why am I so bad at taking vacations?

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I think I realized I had a problem when I was on vacation, my wife and I alone without the kids riding along for the first time in a few years, sitting on a beach in Kauai…..moving my seat so that I could get better wi-fi reception for my laptop. And I even took a couple work calls while on the beach. Now, in my defense around that one trip, things are a bit different when you run your own consulting company. You can’t always choose when and where your clients will reach out to you – and being responsive to their needs to an important aspect of keeping them as a customer. But sitting there on the private Marriott resort beach in Lihue, I suddenly realized that the entire situation was kind of sad, and that I was a workaholic.

Jump forward to this Thanksgiving break. While I am proud to say that I went dark on Twitter for 4 days, it’s a hollow victory: I found myself checking email repeatedly through the long weekend, responding through other social channels, and even working on a whitepaper draft. Pretty sad.

You can tell a lot about a person by their actions when nobody is looking. There’s a video going around online showing CCTV feeds of people doing nice things, like picking up trash that isn’t theirs, chasing down someone who dropped cash, etc. The fact that I am wasting my vacation time with work tasks probably says something about me….

There should be a workaholic branch of AA.