Home Again...

Back at the Kompound again, after a fantastic week in Kauai. The only bad thing about the trip was the crying babies on the plane (both ways, natch) and that wasn’t even that bad, honestly.

Since I didn’t take a laptop, and we didn’t actually do very much besides lay on the beach and stuff food in our face-holes, I had a lot of time to just soak up ambience. This turned out to be remarkably refreshing, creatively-speaking. I haven’t taken a vacation like this before, the sole purpose of which was to relax, so I didn’t really have a good idea of how it would affect my general workaday experience. I think the fact that I spent most of the plane ride home thinking about user interfaces and music and the interaction thereof, via some new ideas I had while laying in the sun speaks to the generally effective nature of vacationing.

I’ve developed–or more to the point Elle has developed–methods for managing my creativity over the years. She knows far better than I when I’m in a slump, and she knows what to get me to do to un-slump things. But I have to admit that I’ve never really done a cold reboot like this before, and I’m somewhat amazed at the floodgates opening like this. Do you find that taking some serious Time Away (no work, no creative endeavors, actual vacation time) does this for you as well? I’d like to think this is a tool I can use to stoke the engines repeatedly in the future.