Saying NO to Work

Coming off of Thanksgiving break has me wondering:

How often do we, as educators, truly take a break?

You see, even when there's no school/work, here's the dialogue that is usually going on in my brain:
"I need to reply to those emails. It would be nice to get ahead on that lesson planning! Oh yeah, and that new tool I wanted to try, this break would be a great time to do that. I can also work on my Google Certification and catch up on grading. And then there's that blog post I told [name] I would write, and that letter of recommendation for [name], and I want to decorate my classroom for the holiday season. And I haven't even gotten to my grad school papers & reading that need to be done, it would be nice to do those when I'm not focusing on school/work."

Honestly, even though I have been working on my work/life balance, I don't think I've taken a real break since last spring. I was busy teaching music, then I dove right into my summer school principal position, and halfway through that, started my new job as an ed tech specialist and jumped to full-time as soon as summer school was over. This Thanksgiving, I was really feeling the need to step away, yet guilt still threatened. It definitely took some discipline to just say NO!

"I need to reply to those emails. NO, they can wait till next week! It would be nice to get ahead on that lesson planning! NO! It would be nice, but it doesn't have to happen. Oh yeah, and that new tool I wanted to try, this break would be a great time to do that. NO! That can happen later. I can also work on my Google Certification and catch up on grading. NO! I don't need to cram all of it right now, and who is really checking grades over break anyway? Even if they are, it is perfectly legitimate to say that I was on break. And then there's that blog post I told [name] I would write, and that letter of recommendation for [name], and I want to decorate my classroom for the holiday season. NO! These can all happen when I go back to work. And I haven't even gotten to my grad school papers & reading that need to be done, it would be nice to do those when I'm not focusing on school/work. NO! You will have time to do that over the weekend, which is when you usually do grad school stuff, you don't need to do it now."

Here's the end of the story - after taking three days completely off, I am back to work today, mostly with grad school. I may not be particularly looking forward to it, but I'm feeling so refreshed! I might even dive into some of my other work today. In a perfect world, I wouldn't work at all over weekends, but I have plenty to do. Taking the time to really get away, though, has me in a much better place than I was previously, and I'm going to guess that my work will go more quickly and be of better quality than it would have if I had forced it over break!

Maybe there is something to learn from a two-year-old whose favorite word is NO! :-)