Once you’ve shored up your promotion and worked yourself into the ground to prove you deserved it, you get to take a much-deserved vacation. In part II, we saved up for it. Now you have to make sure you can get out the door to enjoy it, which often means cramming an extra week’s worth of work into the five days before you depart. Score!
In this situation, consider anticipation vs. reality, and act accordingly.
By that I mean, the anticipation of leaving work behind—and all of the what-ifs and unknowns that come with that territory—is enough to send most people to the panic room. I used to freak the fuck OUT when I was getting ready to go on vacation—not only about getting an additional week’s worth of my own work done, but about what other people might need from me while I was away—and then overprepare accordingly. Plus, I was always checking my goddamn email from vacation anyway, defeating the purpose of having preworried about things that might or might not even come up.
This whole rigmarole was a master class in both anxiety and inefficiency.
In reality, however, arriving back at the office after seven days aboard an all-inclusive Mediterranean cruise is what it is. You stay two hours late one night, power through a few hundred emails (seventy-five of which are immediately delete- or file-able, BTW), and go home to polish off the bottle of ouzo you bought at duty-free. First day back sucks, but you’re relaxed and tan. If you’re Alvin, you’re still drunk. You’ll survive.
It took me until February of 2014—a full fourteen years into my adult working life—to go away for more than a weekend without checking my work email. (Before we all had BlackBerrys, I checked work email on my honeymoon from the hotel “Business Center.” Remember those?) Coincidentally, my first email-free vacation was also my first-ever trip to the town in the Dominican Republic that I now call home, so it seems that keeping my mind clear of work really left room for that whole “living the dream” goal to take root. And I got through almost the entire 300-email backlog while waiting for a taxi home from JFK. That airport has notoriously long lines, but still.
My point is that vacation overprep bleeds right into vacation work-doing, and you need to nip that shit in the bud so you can enjoy the time off you so scrupulously scrimped and saved for. Not to mention, people who check their work email on vacation are 87 percent more likely to drop their phones in a body of water, which adds one more thing to the to-do list upon return.*
If you’re like me (or rather, Old Me), you prepare for vacation the week before you leave by doing all of your work, plus all the work for the week you’ll be gone, and then you scurry around trying to half-finish tasks that aren’t even on anyone else’s radar yet, just in case they pop up before you get back. That last part takes “being responsible” to the level that bleeding ulcers are made of.
Listen to New Me: Your job is to get your shit together, not worry about everyone else’s.
Letting go of things you can’t control is a huge part of the mental decluttering process. And you definitely cannot control whether somebody else decides to do a certain part of their job one day while you’re on vacation, and discovers that they need you for it.
Should you leave all of your responsibilities in a smoldering shit-heap while you swallow a fistful of peyote and commune with the giant saguaro at Big Willy’s Dude Ranch? Of course not. But you also don’t have to predo a bunch of stuff that might never come up. Pack that impulse up in a nice cardboard box and leave it on the street with a sign that says FREE SHIT. Somebody else will take it. Just like somebody else in your office will step in and get the ball rolling on the Q4 numbers if they really have to.
Or more likely, they’ll just wait for you to get back. In which case you can deal solely with the reality of returning from vacation—rather than adding anticipation to your must-do list before you even leave.
If not giving a fuck means no longer caring about/doing certain things, getting your shit together is about making what you need to do easier and less stressful.
Enter: delegating.
Because even better than deciding not to worry about things you can’t control is making someone else worry about them instead, am I right? See ya later, delegator!
Delegating takes many forms, including:
If you have an assistant, you can assign a task to him because—hello—his job is to assist you. Easy.*
You can ask for help from a coworker, offering future coverage to them in return. A little quid pro quo goes a long way.
You can also take someone up on their offer to help you. If you’re overloaded (whether before vacation or just every damn day), and someone—your assistant, your friend, your UPS guy—notices and offers to take something off your plate, for the love of God say yes. And then say thank you.
Finally, you can step down from the starring role in your one-man version of Oliver Twist. All that “Please, sir, I want some more” is getting extremely tiresome, is it not? If you’re in a meeting where assignments for additional work are being handed out like sugar-free lollipops at the dentist’s office, I recommend not raising your hand. I vividly remember the last time I volunteered for extra work at my final corporate job and it led to one of the greatest failures/time-sucks of my professional life. Sugar-free lollipops are so not worth it.
Honestly, I don’t know what it is about asking for more work that makes so many of us feel virtuous. Stop asking for extra work! Let other people who haven’t read any of my books ask for it instead.
When it comes to protecting your time off—or your time in general—you need to set boundaries and enforce them. Once you’ve prepped, delegated, and traded in your cubicle for a cabana, you want to keep your mind clear of pesky work-related worries so you can enjoy your time off to the fullest. The single best way to do this is to disconnect completely from your working life. Not only should you resist the temptation to check email or call in, you shouldn’t even leave that door open a tiny little bit in your out-of-office reply.
This is not disconnecting:
I’m currently taking my six precious vacation days of the year, but checking email periodically, and if your matter is urgent please call Jim, who will then hunt me down on my white-water rafting trip to get an answer for you two business days sooner than you would have gotten one otherwise.
This is:
I’m currently on vacation and will respond to your message when I return.
Unless you’re a surgeon, nobody is going to die on the table because you were unreachable for six days. And I imagine if you are a surgeon, you probably didn’t schedule a vacation during anyone’s lung transplant, so go ahead and disconnect. You’ve earned it.