A holiday: It would be so nice

Having just returned from two weeks of vacation, I can attest to the fact that it took all of three hours for  my shoulders to get tight and for my eyes to get dry from reading and responding to all the emails that couldn't be dealt with while I was away. It took four hours for me to think that I should have taken three weeks instead of just two. By the end of the day, I found myself thinking about one week off every six weeks.
I have found myself wondering these past few days how anything at all does get done during the summer. If I hear one more journalist or one of our sales staff say one more time that everyone is on holidays, I think I will pack up myself and head out of town.
Most of the time, we are expected to return telephone calls within hours and answer emails within minutes but then during the summer, we are somehow able to put everyone and everything on hold for sometimes two or three weeks.  When you combine all of the services with "away" overlaps, it feels as if everything one tries to accomplish grinds to a humid halt.
If my batteries got recharged while I was on holidays, they are drained within days by trying to push projects uphill despite vacation closures and slowdowns.
Maybe vacations used to work, but nowadays, already-overloaded workers can't possibly cover the overloaded schedules of absent co-workers, too.
While I was away from my own day-to-day schedule, I tried to figure out why I feel like I have less time in a day than I used to. Why do I feel that I accomplish less and that it takes more time and more communication to do so?
Speaking to others, I know I am not alone.  We have multiple methods of communication at our fingertips, hanging from our ears and ringing from our computers and I secretly wonder if one-half of the communication time were devoted to actual productivity, would we be further ahead?
Then again, it may be that with the ease of access to our multiple communications tools, we have all become senders of quick, incomplete messages. Add to that our inattentiveness due to the many distractions caused by multiple communications tools and there is no need to wonder why we are not getting things done promptly.
And it turns out that people who multi-task are actually less efficient, so we should all be wondering about the efficiency of having our cell phones and email access with us while we are at meetings, or the wisdom of listening to telephone messages while we are writing replies to email messages.
I concluded that I had to figure out how to stay disconnected long enough to complete tasks and had to tell myself this was not a bad thing. Our work days have changed from completing one or a few significant tasks to moving many, many tasks forward one small step at a time.
A short chat with a lady at the Vankleek Hill Farmers' Market this past Saturday explored the notion that many of us are disconnected from ourselves and from the present. We spend too much time looking back and looking ahead . . . to all that has to be done.
No wonder we are tired, she said.  We are throwing our energy behind us and ahead of us instead of into what we are doing in the moment.
"I don't talk about this with everyone," she confided. Indeed. There isn't much room for holistic thinking in this results-oriented, bring-me-the-solution-not-the-problem world.
"I can feel the load you are carrying," she said.  And I knew she wasn't referring to the corn, bread, tomatoes and apples I had just purchased.
I put my load down and we talked for a few minutes more. After all, it was Saturday morning and I wasn't in a hurry.
All it took to get that feeling was being surrounded by the vendors at the Farmer's Market and the fresh produce, the fresh air and a fresh way of thinking.
It was almost as good as a holiday.