I recently returned from a mini-holiday as the guest of my fiancé, who was attending a conference. The seminar was held in a tropical locale, so we booked ourselves some extra time to just hang out.

Even during the days he was working, we still had time to enjoy meals together, cocktails at sunset, and leisurely walks on the beach.

Each morning at breakfast, while we chatted and watched the birds, I could see other conference attendees anxiously checking their PDAs, talking on their cell phones, and working on their laptops. Rob saw people doing office work and emailing during the speakers’ presentations. When the hotel’s wireless Internet connection went down for a few hours, there was almost an uprising.

In the meantime, I had to keep walking farther down the beach to get away from cell-phone users shouting above the roar of the surf (word got out that the shoreline had the best reception). Even “happy hour” in the lounge seemed a little stressful. It seemed people there couldn’t wait to get back on a plane and scurry to their desks.

Little did they know that all their busywork was actually making them less productive. Think about it: people go somewhere to learn new ideas, meet their peers, and enjoy a little downtime, and then they squander that opportunity by worrying about everything they’re “missing” back at the office. What a waste! I’m no Zen master, but could we not try living in the moment here?

But living in the moment means sometimes being alone with your thoughts, and some of us aren’t too comfortable with that. Loneliness or boredom might creep in, so we fill our time with things that beep and ring and buzz and never leave us with a minute to watch the world go by. To paraphrase John Lennon, “Life is what happens when you’re busy checking your text messages.”

This might sound mean, but I wondered if any those panicky PDA-types were really as important as they thought. Not to say their work isn’t valuable, but I don’t think the whole world would fall apart if they couldn’t be reached for an afternoon. Hey, I understand deadline pressure–I’m a writer. But I also understand that if I vanished from the face of the earth tomorrow, life would just go on for pretty much everyone else. That’s called perspective, and it helps me maintain a balanced lifestyle.

I had a bunch of work to do, too; I was editing a book, writing an article, and working on a new short story, so it’s not like my laptop never came out of the suitcase. But the way I work best is by giving my full concentration to the task at hand, and it just so happens that sometimes that task is sitting on a log and watching a crab dig a hole in the sand before the tide comes in. Now that’s important work.