I’m horrible at taking vacations.
This looks like the perfect location to crush through some support tickets.
It has four bars of WiFi!
I guess to be a little clearer what I should say is that I’m bad at not working during vacation unless I’m somewhere with no connectivity. I routinely check and respond to email while with my family even if we’re in line at Disney World. Or if we’re at dinner at a Vermont getaway. For years, I felt like this was my superpower – I could (and would) work anywhere at any time. I was never disconnected – I even made sure my manager knew how to get hold of me when I was on my honeymoon in the Caribbean. I brought my laptop so I could “catch up” at night.
The absolute worst for me is the stay-cation. A stay-cation for me is just a day that I don’t do any scheduled meetings, but I generally still put in at least a half day working on various projects, or responding to requests throughout the day. After all, I’m home and what else am I supposed to do? Stare at a wall? Last time I tried this, I did two con-calls while I was working on my shed.
Early in my career I was excited and proud about this because it made me feel important, indispensable, and secure in my employment. So long as I was able to be a hero and remote in from a vacation with my wife to save the day – I was probably not likely to be let go. I was committed! Later on, when I had small kids I would lament that I couldn’t ever really get away. I was called on my paternity leave and while I was with my mother dying in hospice; I took the calls – and solved the problems, but also started to sour on my career choice a bit.
More recently, I’ve come to realize something – not in small part due to some tough love from a friend of mine: I’m not being a hero, I’m being a fool. It’s not that people won’t leave me alone, it’s that I’ve conditioned them not to.
I have failed to set boundaries and prioritize taking care of myself. I rapidly and even enthusiastically reply even when it doesn’t actually benefit the business. The overwhelming majority of the calls and support I’ve provided when I was supposed to be offline were not emergencies – they were routine requests that absolutely could have waited. Granted, sometimes the person requesting it was acting as if it was a critical emergency need - but in reality it could have held the week or so until I was back in the office.
This is especially relevant in 2020. I’ve been going at full-throttle since the pandemic began in March, rallying multiple areas of IT to make sure that my university is able to continue providing excellent academic quality in the face of massive disruption. I’ve taken a few days “off” but worked straight through most of them. Over the past month and half or so I’ve been realizing that I’m getting frayed. I’ve also been part of the team dealing with substantial disruption at VMUG, and that’s taken a significant slice of the evening hours I usually try to use to catch up or work on personal projects. It’s been increasingly hard to get out of bed – and my exercise routine has been a miserable, horrible, painful grind for weeks on end. I’m exhausted by 2:00 and I’ve been struggling to get excited about pretty much anything in the evening. On top of that, I’ve been much shorter than I should be with my kids, which is something I have no tolerance for in myself.
I probably have a little more gas left in me than this car…
…but not much.
If you’ve been there, you know what I’m describing – I’m burnt out. I’ve only experienced this once before in my life, and it was short lived due to a confluence of very acute pressures right at the end of my MBA work. I was hell-bent on getting a perfect 4.0 GPA - which I did - but it took a pretty heavy toll because I had some major deliverables in the office that I was trying to get squared away. Some people explode out of grad school with tons of energy – I crawled across the finish line. I’ll never forget the tears my wife and I both shed when I turned in my last final. In contrast, this time the pressures have been much more chronic over a longer timeline and don’t appear to be abating anytime soon.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s a privilege to serve the university I work at and it’s something I do with legitimate passion, but Covid has been a lasting stressor for almost everyone I know who works in higher education IT; we’ve never had to deliver more essential services with less resources. And in most cases delivering services is greatly complicated due to a factor of technical and non-technical reasons.
So when my employer asked employees to burn some vacation time off at the end of the year, I decided that for the first time in my career, I would take two consecutive weeks off – and I wouldn’t do any work. I didn’t plan on checking emails or monitoring our internal Teams dialogues. If the world is ending someone will call me, I thought. I was going to fully disconnect and maybe get some spray foam insulation around the windows in my kids’ rooms so they are less drafty.
And then this morning (I’m writing this on my first day off) I started checking my email. I resisted replying – but by the early afternoon I was starting to twitch a little that I had a ton of unread email, so I read the ones that I thought were timely, deleted a bunch, and replied to a few. As soon as I composed the first message, I started chastising myself for breaking my own commitment – I was going to once again re-enforce that I was online and available. So, I changed the message from an answer to “I’m on vacation, so if you can address this with [another contact who can take care of it] I’d appreciate it.”
If this sounds a bit like a confessional – it is. I’m trying to get better at disconnecting. I’m using this blog post to state for the record that this is bad, and I expect better of myself so I can look back on it and be reminded. It’s an active effort, because I’ve trained myself over twenty years to always, always be available – and that’s not healthy for me. Men in my family have a well-documented history of having their first heart attack about three to five years from where I am now, and then they limp along about twenty more years and drop dead in their mid-sixties. While an unhealthy lifestyle is to blame for much of that, I remember clearly hearing the doctors say more than once to my father that stress held a large portion of the blame.
Incidentally, it’s also not healthy for my organization. I need to do better at trusting that my team (who I have immense respect for) can handle anything that comes up in my absence. I have trained many of them personally and set clear expectations of how we prioritize and manage projects and tasks. They’ve got this and can certainly “watch the shop” in my absence. My team will never have the opportunity to grow and show their capabilities if I’m always there jumping in at every opportunity. And ultimately, a burnt-out Steve is less effective than a fresh Steve for my employer, my community, and my family. I owe all three of them the fresh Steve that I’m depriving them of.
On balance, I’m not entirely sure these things have been good for us as a society.
So, that’s it this week. A confessional and a promise: I’m bad at disconnecting and taking time off, but I’m committed to get better. I don’t think going the cold turkey route and deleting the mail app off of my phone is the path forward to me, but I also need to do a better job of drawing those boundaries and not actively looking for more work to do while I’m out.
I hope in some way this serves as a warning and a model to you. You shouldn’t feel like being disconnected is a sign of weakness or lack of importance. In my view, it’s actually a sign of strength of character. It shows that you have the confidence to step away and know that things are going to be OK in you absence.
I hope you get some time off around the holidays this year and that you get the opportunity to decompress and re-energize with family and friends in some way.
Some questions for reflection:
Do you ever feel guilty about taking time off?
Have you been contacted during vacation time? Was it an honest-to-goodness emergency?
How can you be better at creating boundaries to prevent yourself from being always-on?
(If you have real ideas here, put them in the comments – I’d love to read them!)
