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The tech industry is busy. There are so many interruptions, and in todays connected World, there are so many ways to be interrupted. Emails alert on my Mac, phone, my tablet, and if I had an Apple Watch, they’d be buzzing at my wrist too. In our always-on lifestyles, it’s hard to get away from demands.

Beyond the technological intrusions, there’s the fear factor. What happens if I miss that tweet, that email, that snapchat? Will I miss the latest greatest trending topic, or will I miss that most urgent of client emails? Will my client go somewhere else if I don’t respond until the morning? Will my developers stall, or worse go off on a tangent, if I don’t provide that important guidance to them right now! What happens if something happens on the other side of the World when it’s 3am my time? How do I manage? Do I need to check my notifications as soon as I open my eyes?

It’s easy to spiral this behaviour so that it consumes us all. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if people I know are “always on”, then I need to be always on too.

But that’s not the case. I’ve recently come back from a week’s holiday camping in a forest in Wales where there was no mobile data signal. I found a couple of places with Wi-fi but the service was so slow that at best it told me how many emails I had but wouldn’t download them to my phone (BTW I grew up in Wales, this isn’t a dig at Wales!).

But what amazed me was that after about the first hour or so of trying to connect, I found it easy to put the phone away and spend time with my family. There was only a couple of occasions where I missed the connectivity, where I wanted to see what was happening, but this was out of curiosity and not out of a feeling of missing out.

The end result of this is I came back far more relaxed, far more focused, far more hungry to go for what I would love to create than at any point in the past 5 or 6 months. What’s more is I ate better, exercised more (although this was mostly pulling the kids around the forest trails on a wooden cart or carrying fire wood!), read more, engaged more with my Wife and children and those around me. I even played my guitar around the camp fire.

It’s at times like this that I sit back and wonder why I haven’t taken a break in 6 months, yet in the middle of that 6 months I was convinced I couldn’t step out of the action for more than a day or two.

So my call to all of my fellow people in tech is to get out into the wild, get out into nature, get away from mobile coverage and wi-fi. Spend time with friends and family, even if it is just a few days.

You’ll be surprised how quickly you forget about the interruptions, and how quickly you’ll be in the flow of living and being instead of doing!