Afraid of going away on holiday? 😬
Lean into the fear. It will reveal the truth of your time off problems.
Let’s quickly recap our month of “kindly peer pressuring our readers to book time off.” (Seriously, if you need an accountability buddy, we got you.)
So far, we’ve talked about why all kinds of time off (holidays, life admin days, 3 day weekends) is worth having and protecting. Last week, Jade talked to us about the importance of play - especially how it rewrites how we experience time.
These are related - we don’t always have enough days to take off, or if we do, we don’t always book the kind of time off we need to recharge. And when we do, we still don’t always prioritise doing what will be enjoyable.
But if we have the days, and know what kind of time to take off, and know how to find ways to enjoy it, there’s nothing stopping us from having the Most Effective Time Off Ever. Right?
…wrong. You know and I know: one of the hardest parts of taking time off is the fear. Which fear, you ask? So many to choose from!
Maybe it’s the fear of getting in trouble for being away. Or it’s the fear of missing something important. Or the fear of something going terribly wrong. Or the fun fear that you forgot something. Or most understandable of all - fearing what you’ll come back to.
So let’s dig in - how not to be afraid of taking time off.
What keeps you from taking your time off? Send it in by responding to this email, commenting, or in our DMs- we’ll answer in next week’s Q&A!
Here’s the TL;DR:
Your fear of taking time off is real, AND - the fear provides invaluable data about where you most need to give notice and make plans.
Let’s take this a piece at a time.
Your fear is real.
If you’re feeling it, it’s real. As to why it’s real - that is unique to you. Perhaps you work in a not-nice place where humans are punished for taking time off. Perhaps you don’t trust your human-in-charge or your team members to “handle” your work without you. Perhaps you came back from a vacation once and missed a big email. Perhaps you work somewhere nice, but you can’t shake the feeling they do just fine without you. Perhaps you aren’t taking the kind of time off that is recharging you and you’re pre-worrying about coming back to work tired. Regardless of how rational the fear is, the effects can’t be ignored - not if you want to enjoy your time off.
The fear provides invaluable data.
Fear isn’t a character failing. It is a hardwired instinct that has kept humans alive for millennia. It is the feeling of a lion watching us from the grass, or the sense we’re being followed too closely as we walk alone at night. Fear is your mind alerting you.
Unfortunately, it’s not like it announces clearly “what” it is alerting you to. You do have to investigate where the fear is coming from. But it’s uncomfortable to sit in it, right? So, we try to push it away.
However, if you try to immediately squash it out with, say, toxic positivity - “Everything will be fine! I will enjoy my two week holiday!” - you are 1) not giving respect to the physical and emotional effects fear can have, which will SURELY put a damper on whatever is planned for your time off; and 2) you’re ignoring your best system for identifying threats.
And the two biggest threats to time off are adequate notice and well thought out plans.
If you’re feeling especially fearful about taking your time off, I bet one of these areas needs attention.
The fear is telling you where to give notice.
In a perfect world, a simple OOO should do the trick for our work life (and a sunny photo posted with #outofoffice should give everyone else the right idea). But where we let other humans interrupt our holiday is by equating “setting notice” with “giving notice.”
Setting notice is making it clear you’re away while you’re away. This is an OOO on your email, an away status on your Slack workspace, a request of holiday in advance for your manager to see it, putting a notification on your business WhatsApp/instagram account, etc.
But you will definitely feel fear about going away if the only way other humans will know about it is if they happen to email you to ask for something. (PS. This isn’t nice to do to anyone, either).
Usually, this is when we’ll get aggravated - when they attempt to “break through” our holiday mode. But they might feel like they need to, because we didn’t “give” them notice.
Giving notice is giving all affected people, in advance, in person/1:1 and written form (for provability), information regarding our upcoming absence.
This looks like telling….
Your colleagues, including those who work with you on projects, and those humans who only sometimes rely on you for help + questions
Your clients and customers
Your service providers - accountant, lawyer, contractors, etc.
Your partners - contractors, companies you work with for other client work, etc.
….as much in advance as possible that you will be gone.
This can feel like a huge “to tell” to-do list, but doing it before you go away should give you peace of mind while you’re away. You can rest assured thinking, “I did tell them.” (And if they break through your OOO anyway with a non-emergency? Time to practice those boundaries.)
A big fear of taking time off is enjoying it fully/making it worthwhile. The other people to give notice to, then, is whoever you’re traveling with. If they have big plans for going to a service-less mountaintop for 3 days, it is also your responsibility to tell them, in advance, that you might need to cut that short, or have wifi access, because the work environment you’re in is not one where you can ignore something for 3 days and have a job when you get back. Same goes for visiting family over the holidays. Our loved ones and parents love having us home. But - they don’t know our work calendar or work dynamic. If we don’t give them a heads up that we might need to answer in an emergency, we could end up “waiting and seeing” ourselves into a quite unpleasant day.
PS. All of this sucks - if you’re off, you should be off - but it is true for many humans at work. Giving notice is one of the ways we can lessen stress.
The fear is telling you where to make plans.
Each of those fears we listed at the top are solvable - if you put a plan in place. If we just up and “leave work,” we’re def going to have travel anxiety. The kind that says, “you forgot to do something,” because we did, indeed, forget to do something. Like planning our time away.
Here are a few actionable plans you can put in place to help make sure these fears don’t become reality.
The fear of getting in trouble for being away.
This goes back to giving adequate notice. Tell everyone you’re away - as early as you can. I like at least a month. If you have a particularly troublesome or needy client, enlist your manager and give them a heads up that they might be weird about you being away. Have your manager or a team member join your calls a few weeks in advance so they have a working relationship with this person before they, you know, just show up on their calls. If your manager is being weird about you being away - schedule a meeting to talk through all of your plans (below) so they can hear directly from you what your plan is for being gone. If you’re a freelancer, give as much notice as possible, make sure they have access to all of your files, and decide what level of communication you can handle (so you have clients to come back to).
The fear of missing something important/the fear of something going terribly wrong.
For everyone: Proactively communicate you’ll be gone, with dates. Always put a contact email (in your Slack statuses, Out of Office email, etc.) so your clients/partners know who to ask if something important does come up.
If you’re an employee, set up email forwarding so emails go to your manager so nothing “critical” will escape attention. Share with your team how to get a hold of you, as well as what constitutes a “true” emergency. Walk them through your work, and make sure they have all the accesses/passwords/background colour they need.
The fear that you forgot something.
I recommend the practice of visualisation here (great book on this). Visualise what you are asking your colleagues to do for you/cover while you’re gone, or what your clients will need to do without you. Literally, walk through it in your brain, or on your laptop, and make sure that you’ve 1) shared all the links 2) given all the right accesses 3) written down the current status and what needs to happen next, 4) shared who the point person is for questions and 5) shared any background/colour/information they might need. For this last one, I like voice notes. It’s much easier for them to re-listen to while you’re away. And, in case this works for your situation, make sure you know how (and if) you can access what you need while you’re away. This is the most time-consuming part of being away, and you might know it as a “handover.” The best action you can take to protect your time away is to write a really, really, really good handover.
The fear of what you’ll come back to.
Visualisation time again! Visualise what you’re fearing - is it a bunch of slack messages from clients? Is it because you missed important emails that expired because you didn’t see them? Is it projects moving ahead in a bad direction without you? This is data. Use it to write a better handover, share more proactive notice that you’re gone, and/or let your colleagues know what’s at stake in your email so they can help keep an eye out for it.
So if you’ve:
✅ Recognised that your fear is real
✅ Stopped fighting the fear, and instead used it for data
✅ Which helped you give better notice and make better plans
And you’re still feeling afraid of taking time off? Then, my friend, I think you’re in need of a final piece of advice. If you’ll allow me, an edit to our above TL;DR.
Your fear of taking time off is real. While the fear can provide invaluable data about where you most need to give notice and make plans, these won’t deliver absolute certainty. You must let go.
As you may remember, I took time off to get married this month (to my co-founder/partner in life!) But the only way we felt comfortable doing that is by closing our business entirely. That’s right - everyone was on holiday, not just us.
First thing to note here: It is very common, or was, for businesses to close entirely so everyone gets a break. Imagine a vacation where no one can text you asking you for that one email because no one is looking for that one email. And instead of one person coming back with irritatingly happy rested energy, we all come back with irritatingly happy rested energy. This is a soapbox for another time, but it is a weird state of the world to expect every business to be available 52 weeks a year.
But we did this because the first: the fear is real. We couldn’t maneuver around the fact that, as owners, something could come up in the normal course of business that would need our attention. We couldn’t be certain, no matter what we did, that on the day of our wedding we would be left alone. But instead of letting fear interfere with our right to be away, we used it as data. We evaluated our options, and chose the one that gave us the strongest likelihood of not needing to work. Then we gave ample notice. We made our plans for true emergencies and then… we let go.
If you wait until you’re 100% sure that other humans will realise, remember, or be able to 100% respect the boundaries of you being away, you will never leave work. All you can do is use the fear for data as much as possible, and control what you can control by notifying who will be affected and making plans for them to handle it without you. And then let go. They (whoever they are) will survive without you (if you’ve given them the tools to).
Kindly,
Rachel
Links We Love 📚
This chart from the OECD (global org founded in 1961 to “stimulate economic progress and world trade ) that tracks labor productivity. Interesting correlation between countries with paid time off policies and countries…without them. If the summer of protests have taught us anything, it’s that the French are NOT lazy.
A concept new to many of us - “the right to rest and leisure.” As enshrined in documents with very chill names like the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Killer quote from the Wikipedia article: “Defenders of the right to rest and leisure claim that it is of fundamental importance to well-being once basic security has been assured, and that leisure is ‘not an idle waste of time or mere absence from work, but, rather, necessary for a life of dignity.’
Helpful reading and reminders from Nice Work:
Life is too short to think about work outside of work. Translation: Set up those processes and get AWAY.
Sometimes, we are our own problem (we’ve all been there). Here’s how to own your part in work dynamics that don’t work.