Not checking email is difficult. Very difficult. When I take a real vacation I have to coordinate to have my VPN access shut off, or I will not be able to prevent myself from reading email. It's a sickness.
The first few days of a vacation I tend to have work on my mind. I find that if I'm having trouble letting go, it can be useful to write down what's on my mind so that it will be there when I return to work. Otherwise, I'll try to keep the idea in my brain, and that just prevents me from letting go.
I've heard system administrators brag about not taking vacation. "This company can't survive without me! I'm proud that I haven't had a vacation in years." I cringe when I hear this. As a manager, I fear an SA may develop a martyr complex. A person with a martyr complex assumes that because she is paying such a great price to keep the company running, everyone owes her something. She becomes impossible to work with. I find that a person in this situation eventually feels overwhelmed, cornered, and unable to escape. The person who feels this way typically leaves the company soon, often unexpectedly, and I lose a technically talented person who is difficult to replace.
Tip
I feel less cornered when I can leave a job easily and without guilt. Keeping good documentation helps that. Chapter 12 explains how to make it easier to document processes.
A long vacation has another business benefit—it helps determine where your coverage and/or documentation is lacking. Good system administrators assume that they may be hit by a truck tomorrow and the company should be able to continue without them. Taking a long vacation is one way to test that theory without suffering bodily harm.
Here's my advice about taking a vacation:
Two weeks before you leave, figure out what coverage is needed and spend time training the person who is covering for you.
The week before you leave, make sure that the person can do those tasks without asking questions.
The day before you leave, do not do anything as root or Administrator. You don't want to make any changes that can't be fixed. If the temptation is great, distract yourself: spend the day writing documentation.
When you return, take time to see where the coverage gaps occurred. It is common to find that something stopped working and that your company lived without it until you returned. What was it that broke? What could have been documented?
"But how could I ever train someone to know everything that I know?" You don't have to. He only has to know enough so that your company can survive a week or two. For example, maybe one of your jobs is to generate a certain set of reports each week. The person who covers for you doesn't have to know how to create new report templates, just how to run the ones that exist. If a new report template is needed, it can wait until you get back. If it is a real emergency, people can print out a few reports and cut and paste the bits of paper into the format they need. (In reality, the person who needs the report will understand because she takes vacations, too.)
Here's another example: maybe you are in charge of backups. The person covering for you needs to know how to do any daily tape changes and how to restore a deleted file or directory. He doen't need to know how to add a new disk volume to the schedule or how to readjust the schedule. It is unlikely that a new disk will be added to the system while you are away, and if some manager has a brilliant new backup schedule she'd like to see implemented, waiting another week should be fine. Of course, if a catastrophic failure happened and RAID or other failover systems weren't able to save the data, you might have to come back from vacation early, but how often does that happen? (And if it would result in losing millions of dollars per day, why is only one person trained in your disaster-recovery process? But I digress....)
When you have someone trained to cover for you, it's important to make sure that you coordinate vacations so that you both aren't out at the same time. This is a normal business practice. In fact, at most companies I know, the CEO coordinates time off with the CFO, and the VP of engineering coordinates with a direct report. We are at least as important and should do the same.
Yoga, Meditation, and Massage
From an early age I had bizarre misconceptions about yoga, meditation, and massage. I thought they were strange things that should be ignored. How wrong I was! They are all excellent techniques for relaxing the body and mind. They are important parts of a good relaxation and stress management program to maintain top mental health.
But before I go on, let me embarrass myself by telling you what I thought they were:
Yoga. I thought yoga was some kind of weird exercise that people did to become more flexible. Bad experiences with gymnastics at an early age convinced me that I could never be flexible, so I ignored yoga. Why would I need to be physically flexible?
Meditation. I thought meditation was some kind of religious thing. In particular, something that wasn't part of my religion, so I turned a blind eye to the topic (or should I say a blind third eye?).
Massage. I had two conflicting misconceptions about massage. The first was that I thought it was some kind of self-indulgent pampering that rich people did. I ain't rich, so I ignored it out of hand. Second, as a young child, I saw Peter Sellers play the role of a masseur on The Muppet Show. He twisted Kermit's body in all sorts of crazy ways. I couldn't understand why anyone would subject himself to that.
It's funny how early impressions stay with us for so long.
When I was in my mid-20s, I signed up for a class on relaxation that met one night a week for eight weeks. I wouldn't have taken it if I knew it was going to teach things like yoga, meditation, and massage. As I said, those were "weird" things that I ignored. They tricked me!
The idea of the class was to give people a taste of various techniques. It wasn't expected that everyone would enjoy all of them. However, if there was a single one that worked well for you, you could explore that further. Sort of like the fried appetizer special at Denny's.
Here's what I learned:
Yoga. Yoga is the practice of an ancient discovery concerning relaxation. By putting your body in certain positions and holding those positions, the body relaxes. The muscles relax. When that happens—the mind relaxes. Who knew?
Meditation. Meditation is an intentional quieting of the mind. If you can shut out all other noise and thoughts, your mind can relax and your body will follow. The better you get at it, the more amazing it gets. Oh, how wrong I had been.
Massage. Massage is the physical manipulation of the muscles to relax them. I have back pains, and it was quite amazing to learn that it's not my back that hurts, it's the muscles in my back getting so tight that they hurt. They don't relax (loosen) all the way because of the pain, which means they stay tight, which hurts. That pain makes them tighten more, and the cycle builds on itself. Massage relaxes the muscles and brings them to a calm, relaxed state. I find that a monthly massage keeps my muscles from ever getting too tight (sort of similar to how rebooting Windows servers once a month helps them stay fresh).