Whenever I switch from work mode to vacation mode, I am susceptible to simply drop everything, turn on my out-of-office message on all email accounts and disappear from the world for a bit.

The challenge is my self-discipline easily falls with it and I feel, after a few days, that I am just wasting my time. So, I have taken on the habit of actually planning my vacations, both in terms of what happens in the different weeks and in terms of scheduling some action items every day that allow me to make small amounts of progress on the topics that I don’t get around to during work periods.

So, I have done a two week hike, updated my website, built an outdoor table, read several books and worked my way through a list of seminal AI papers (as selected for me by Claude). I am even writing this reflection as part of my daily action items.

I realized that in sports there is something known as active recovery where you don’t just lie on the couch after a hard workout, but rather do light exercise to recover faster. I believe the same is true for vacation as a means to recover from a tiring work period. Pure rest is less effective than keeping going, but at a lighter pace. So, how do you recover the fastest from a hard and busy period?