Plan a great staycation

How to make staying home feel worthwhile

Travel can be awesome, but sometimes it’s not the best solution for vacation days. Maybe you’ve been traveling a lot for work and have zero desire to sit on a plane again. Maybe your budget is stretched. Maybe you live somewhere amazing in its own right.

In any case, a staycation can be fun. The key is to make sure that it actually feels like a vacation — which, like most things, involves planning ahead.

What are we aiming for?

The first step is to figure out your main intention for the staycation. Is it to spend time with your family? To explore your own city? To relax? If it’s to get caught up on all your house projects from the past year, best to acknowledge that and be honest about it.

The reason to know your motivation is that different goals suggest different approaches. If your goal is to relax, and you’ve got small kids, taking a few days off work and then staying home with them gives you the life that stay-at-home parents experience all the time. Most of them don’t describe this as relaxing. So if relaxation is your goal, you’ll need to trade off with a partner or use whatever childcare you’ve got for some of the time.

As with any vacation, I also suggest planning one anchor event per day. This is something pleasurable or adventurous that will give the day a bit of structure.

You probably know a lot of the big hits in your town that could become anchor events, but it might be worth checking out a local guide book from the library and seeing if there’s anything you’ve overlooked. You might also get tickets for seasonal celebrations. Over Christmas this past year, for instance, I went to the Nutcracker one day, a light display downtown on a different day, and Disney on Ice on a third. Knowing this ahead of time kept us from arguing about what we planned to do each day, or feeling like we were wasting our vacation, yet still left plenty of down time.

Minimizing the have-to-dos

As for that downtime, the problem of staying in your house is that your to-dos can follow you around. Indeed, they can expand to fill the available space. If you’re at work and the floor is dirty in the middle of the day, you don’t see it. If you’re home, you do.

This is why some people actually rent a hotel room during their staycations. It’s still cheaper than flying somewhere — and the hotel isn’t going to expect you to clean the kitchen.

That said, if you report to a workplace daily, or travel a lot for work, the upside of a staycation might be actually getting to enjoy your house during daylight hours. So you don’t need to leave. Just make sure to compress and minimize all have-to-dos. Give yourself 30-60 minutes for any chores or errands (same with email!) during your staycation. If it doesn’t happen in that time, it isn’t that important. You can spend the rest of your time in vacation mode — with no chance of losing your luggage!