WORKING ON HOLIDAY? DON’T GIVE ME A BREAK

“If I let you know where I’m going,” Ethan Hunt tells his boss in Mission: Impossible II, “I won’t be on holiday.”

It’s a great line. But, loath though I am to take issue with the superb Mr Hunt, I have to disagree. Because if you are trying to get a small business off the ground, sometimes you simply have to accept you cannot completely unplug yourself from the corporate world for two weeks.

In the end, it comes down to a simple question. If the extent to which you worry about missing out on potential customers outweighs the degree to which your holiday is disturbed by having to take and make business calls, take the phone and laptop with you.

It certainly did for me, which is why I spent a noticeable proportion of a fortnight in Cornwall checking emails, making calls and generally keeping in touch with LeBoo Media-related activity.

The business is nowhere near mature enough for me to be able to flop on the beach completely free of concern that I should still be, or at least part of me should be, wearing a corporate hat rather than shorts and shades.

So I gave into it. I spent a couple of afternoons in the local library revising some content for a new client. On a couple of occasions I was the first customer of the day in the one nearby café that had a reliable internet connection so that I could spend an hour or so reading and responding to emails.

Did I feel I missed out in any way? No. I got to spend plenty of quality time with my wife and daughters. My girls are old enough to be able to amuse themselves rather than require a parental entertainment committee at their beck and call.

I tended to turn to work when the skies turned grey – which, given that we were in England, was all too often. But we had sunny days as well and I felt the balance was about right. Put it this way, I never ended up sitting at my laptop on the beach.

Was this holiday as relaxing as a complete break? Not even close. Was it better for me to spend some of the time working than to turn my back on the business completely? Absolutely.

And at least I now have a clear target for next year. When someone asked me recently what my business aims were for the medium term, I had a simple answer: “To be able to leave the laptop at home when we go away next summer.”

Now that is something work working for.