Is Your Brain Wired to the Office? Here’s a Sure Fire Way to Disconnect.

Yesterday, I tested out one of the recommendations on how to detach from the office suggested in the Wall Street Journal article, Why Relaxing is Hard Work, June 15, 2010.   ”Try something new,” was the first suggestion for how to make sure your time away from the office is truly time detached from work.

Try something new. Learning something in a new place can be more relaxing and refreshing than trying to do nothing. While it’s good to get outside your comfort zone, it’s not necessary to explode out of it. “I don’t want to go bungee jumping,” says Matthew Edlund, a sleep expert in Sarasota, Fla., and author of “The Power of Rest” who says he’d much prefer walking through Berlin or Beijing. “You decide what your level of adventurousness is and do it.

My level of adventure was to schedule a lesson to learn to YOLO. (It’s a new verb.)  YOLO as in “You Only Live Once” – That’s what it’s called, because a small company located in Destin, FL has done very good work on their brand.  Here you don’t go “stand up paddle boarding”; you go YOLOing.

Elizabeth, my daughter and business partner, and I  carved out this Thursday afternoon beginning at 2 pm. We deemed that space on our calendars as sacred and scheduled all our business around it. We could easily have filled it in with a conference call.  We didn’t.

On Eastern Lake, a couple of miles west of Seagrove Beach, we met up with Tom, owner of Yolo and our teacher for the next hour.  I didn’t explode out of my comfort zone (it was a calm day and we were on a lake) but I was challenged.  Age had nothing to do with it.  Elizabeth found it challenging too!

Here’s how trying something new worked to detach me from the office for an afternoon.

1. Carrying any electronic device is impossible because you might fall off the board into the water.  Bad for your Blackberry.  Conclusion?  Literally, you won’t be able to take a call, text or read your email for 2 hours.
2. Thinking about strategy for the business or what work challenges are for the next day?  Forget it.  You are glued to how you are going to stay on that board.  Although falling off wouldn’t be all that bad since it’s hot, it’s not too cool looking.  And no matter what your age, ingrained into every subconscious is the desire to look cool.  In-voluntarilary ending up in the water is a no, no no.
3. Talking about business.  Nope.  Any conversation is around “upwind,” “downwind” “when to tack” “how to turn.”  Once on the board and doing pretty good, the response to any suggestion from Tom (i.e., if you just step around and turn sideways like a surfer, you can have a little different experience going down wind) is “Yeah right, Tom.” You do not want to move my feet even though they are tingling from the stress of clutching to the board.
4. Any extra brain power focuses on physical needs.  While the brain is figuring out why you have placed your body on this slip of a board and want to stay balanced there as well as move through the water, certain physical needs reign and occupy your mind as well as any conversations you have:

I’m hot.

I’m thirsty.

Get your board away from my board.

I have to go to the bathroom.

We topped the evening off with another first.  Thai at Daddy’s Bar-Be-Que in Ft. Walton – another first.  I had heard good things about their lemon grass soup and always wanted to stop here.  Under the sign pictured left, a plastic streamer strung to two trees says, “Thai.”

Elizabeth was game but remarked as I pulled into the drive way, “this place looks scary.”  It’s a real true shack. There were no customers there at 7pm and that was a little disconcerting.

But, of course, you know the ending.  Best Thai food we ever had!

So find a couple of hours on your calendar, try something new and I promise you’ll be in rare form – refocused and energized – for attacking work the next day.