Let's not mince words: Everything you know about "taking a vacation" is wrong.

I'm not kidding. What you know about holidays is wrong about time, wrong about place, wrong about method, and, most importantly, wrong about attitude.

Salaryman and entrepreneur, boss and employee, sybarite and worker bee: We're all prisoners of a travel "industry" that wants to direct us to certain places at certain times. We're slaves to our history, which lionizes the Great American Summer Vacation because that's what we had as schoolchildren. And we're bamboozled by politically correct business commentators who insist that you're cheating yourself unless you totally unplug from your day-to-day life for a specified period of time.

The more you travel on business, the more you realize that the simple act of "going somewhere" for a set number of days is not a vacation. If that were true, business travelers would always be on holiday. Travel is self-evidently not a cure for what ails you.

But rather than create a laundry list of what's wrong with commonly accepted ideas of a vacation—and, more specifically, the summer vacation—let me lay out some alternative approaches to resting, relaxing, and reinvigorating your mind and body.

Maybe Now Isn't the Time

I understand the almost primeval drive for a summer holiday. The weather in the Northern Hemisphere is generally pleasant. We always got a summer holiday as schoolchildren, and that vacation period is rooted in the rhythms of our agricultural past. The Italians have even enshrined the concept of a summer vacation period as Ferragosto. It's a national holiday on August 15 and marks the height of the seasonal travel frenzy.

But here's a question that is especially relevant for entrepreneurial types: When are you most productive? It's usually when there are fewer people around and you have time to think and create without the distraction of corporate processes and niggling day-to-day annoyances. And isn't that now, in the middle of summer, when everyone else is on holiday?

Bottom line: Give yourself the freedom to stay in the office when everyone else is gone. You might be surprised how much you create.

Who Says You Have to Go Somewhere?

I'm a big fan of travel, but I try not to be a tool of the travel industry. It's in the industry's financial interest to convince you to go somewhere on a holiday. After all, if you don't fly, book hotels, and rent cars, they don't make money.

But travel is costly and often disruptive. You may do just as well staying home on a holiday. If you crave sleep, pull the covers over your head and snooze. If all you want to do is work in your garden, do it. Simply want to tackle that stack of unread books and unscreened videos? What better place than the cocoon you've built for yourself at home. And here's something you rarely hear: You probably don't know your own hometown as well as you should. Your best vacation strategy might be sticking close and seeing the sites you pass every day on the way to work.

Bottom line: Give yourself the freedom to stay home if that helps you relax and recharge. Don't take a traveling holiday just so you can say you were "on vacation."