Commentary

Chris Murphy
Editor, InformationWeek  

Why I Wish I'd Brought My Laptop On Vacation

I'm a vacation zealot--I'm all about unplugging, leaving the office behind. But this time, I took it too far.
I'm a vacation zealot--I'm all about unplugging, leaving the office behind. But this time, I took it too far.Let's face it, sometimes it's more stressful to try to leave it all behind. I've read the articles about how unhealthy it is to drag the gadgets along. I've seen our coverage of the options for hitting the road without a laptop in the wake of the terrorist threats.

And last week, I dogmatically left my work laptop at home before loading up the family truckster for the 10-hour drive to a seven-day beach vacation. But there was one thing hanging over me, one thing I wanted to check about an article I had running in this week's magazine about IT strategy changes at the mortgage financing company Freddie Mac. If I could've popped down for 10 minutes to tap the Wi-Fi network at the coffee shop, I could've put it to rest and cleared it off my brain. Instead, it hung over me, ever so slightly, for several days before I resolved it and could truly leave work behind. I left the laptop at home out of principle, and it made life more stressful, not less. Mobile technology isn't the devil we let it be. If we use it to make it easier to relax by a lake on vacation, we win. If we let it be a ball-and-chain that leaves us pondering a trip to the cold, dark bottom of that lake, then, well, we're sunk.


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links