• by Tom Theys , Op-Ed Contributor, October 7, 2015

When holiday season approaches, the number of news articles about the importance of “switching off” rises with the temperature.

I envy those who manage to switch off emails, computers and smartphones completely while they stroll around their vacation destinations. I’ve tried many times in the past to do that too. I’ve tried to cut off from the binary world and let my out-of-office take care of the rest.

But, it doesn’t work for me. I’ve noticed that my nervousness a couple of days before my return flights has not been about my plane potentially crashing but about my mailbox exploding on the Monday I return to work. Thus I never really cut myself off from the outside world when I’m away. 

I get that we owe it to ourselves, our company and our clients to take some real time off every now and then. After all, our most essential working tool is our mind. Like a football team expects their players to take enough rest between games, we are expected to let our minds rest and recharge. You could argue that in our business, working too hard and not taking enough time off to recharge would be a lack of professionalism.

I think PTO is as essential to our job as advertising people as Adobe Illustrator, PowerPoint and Photoshop. It is where our brain sucks up the energy it needs for good ideas and solid advice. Bitter is the juice of an orange that hasn’t seen the sun.

I’m actually not a workaholic. On the contrary, I’m a fan of laziness. And, I truly do believe in the power of taking personal time off. I just personally can’t shut off completely for a couple of weeks once a year. So, I switch off a bit every day. A couple of times a day, in fact. After all, every day asks for a holiday. I actually take mini-PTOs in between meetings. Smartphones are full of stuff for that. Sudoku works wonderfully well. It needs your focus and triggers areas in your brain while the other lobes can virtually go drink from a coconut on the beach.

If you’re not the gaming kind and still want to give your brain a quick foot massage, turn to gossip. I mean, not the hearsay kind about what happened to the new intern at the latest agency party, but gossip you find online. One minute of Kardashian slander may give your brain an extra spark in the hours that follow. There’s tremendous value in a few moments of total brain meltdown every now and then that refreshes the tired little cells. Small bulbs of buzz act on the intellectual worker’s brain like a banana on a tennis player’s body or pain spray on a football player’s knee. A guilty pleasure for the mind that helps me crack those briefs.