How To Keep Your Job From Ruining Your Vacation
Here's what you can do before, during, and after your vacation to make it restful and help you disconnect.
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Work ruins vacations. Lucky is the IT pro who has not experienced this: You're on a long-awaited vacation and your phone rings. Your boss has a question, or needs your help. Maybe you do it to yourself. You check your email and spot an issue you know the folks at the office are trying to handle without you, but you can't enjoy yourself until you know it is fixed. How do you keep work from ruining your vacation?
Through a complex plan requiring cunning and guile, of course. Though sometimes all you need is a little planning and a few good apps to turn your "working" vacation into a real vacation.
Why does it matter? The health effects are great. Vacations reduce stress and improve health. Time away makes you an effective, productive worker. Yet, in 2014, Americans took only 51% of their paid vacation days, according to a survey by careers site Glassdoor and Harris Interactive. The survey polled of 2,300 workers who receive paid vacation days. Even worse, 61% of respondents said they work while they're on vacation, 25% said they've being contacted by a colleague about a work-related matter while taking time off, and 20% have been contacted by their boss.
If we're not going to use all our available vacation days, we sure as heck ought to enjoy the days we do take. Work can certainly carry on without us, and we can carry on without working nonstop. Here's what you can do before, during, and after your vacation to make it restful and help you disconnect. Check out our tips, and then tell us in the comments section below what you to do to make the most of your vacation.
Step one: Use a free app to count down the days to your upcoming vacation. Not only will it give you some free time, but you're participating in something called nexting, a term author Shane Lopez came up with for increasing your hope and happiness by thinking about the next good thing in your life. Sound a bit squishy? Yeah, but a study was done showing that thinking about watching your favorite movie increases your endorphins by 27%. Vacation ought to be worth more than that.
Don't stress out over vacation. Apps like TripIt help you organize your itinerary, reservations, road trip info, and more by forwarding your emails and organizing the data in one location on the app. It even syncs to your calendar. Since planning vacation can be such a pain, eliminate as many roadblocks as you can.
Another stressor is meeting the needs of your family. A 10-minute phone call to check in at work might not ruin your vacation. But a 10-minute check-in while your family is screaming in your ear about wanting to hit the pool might. If you need to incorporate a little work into your week for your own peace of mind, then make sure you plan it into the vacation so everyone is on the same page.
Feeling alienated in a new place can make you "homesick" for work. Going somewhere new is exciting, but it can also be stressful. Feeling like more like a "local" can help. Before you go, and while you are there, check out Localscope. It's a mobile app that scrapes social media, review sites such as Yelp, and other local sites to see where the locals go. This insider knowledge can make you feel more at home than spending time in tourist traps, and it might keep you from checking on work email.
Make sure your email out-of-office autoreply message provides a list of contacts for every kind of problem. Make it clear in your message that you are away on vacation and not on a business trip. If you can, inject a little humor, or a glimpse of where you are going, so people feel guilty about interrupting you. Most importantly, if you've got a longish vacation, make sure you tell people how long it will be before you respond, so they seek out someone else to solve their problem. For your internal out-of-office autoreply, it also helps to point people to additional resources available in internal wikis or data repositories.
If you must check in with the office, choose a pre-determined time. That way your vacation can be planned around it. If you know you need to start every morning with a status call, you won't feel bad, because you can follow that up with a fun vacation activity or a relaxing brunch. Having to take a random work call while you are at the spa would be a bummer.
Do we need to tell you this one? A buzzing, ringing, beeping phone with flashing lights isn't going to make for a relaxing time. Turn it off, even for social media. Check your phone when you feel like it.
Sometimes, all you need is a little plausible deniability. Sorry, boss, I didn't get that call (or email, or text) because I was out of range. Great, but now your phone is useless, right? Apps such as Pocket will let you keep and store items from the Internet you want to read even when you are offline. Premium streaming services for music and video will allow the same thing. If you really aren't available, they can't find you.
Send work a postcard using an app such as Postagram. "Having a great time. Wish you weren't here." Do we need to tell you to only do this with colleagues who will enjoy the joke?
One of the toughest things about vacation is winding down and getting some rest. If you're always on the go, you might not recharge. There are countless sleep apps. Sleepmaker Rain is a nice summer vacation app for a tropical location. Others play soothing music or guide mediation. Before you leave, find an app that works for you, and use it during your trip to make sure you get the rest you need.
When you get back, don't try to catch up on all the email. Most of it doesn't matter anymore. You don't need to read the 15-message thread about something that was resolved without you. Instead, delete it all (except maybe the last day) and meet with your key team members and your managers. Ask what important things you missed. They'll skip the stuff you didn't need to know. It's also a good way to connect with your team with your batteries recharged. And boy, will it be less stressful than trying to read 1,000 emails.
What do you think? Will this help you on your next vacation? How will you relax? Do you have problems disconnecting? Tell us where you plan on going for your next vacation so we can all be jealous. We'll see you in the comments section below.
Are your fears ruining your vacation, or is it your boss? Sit down and talk to your boss about what is really expected while you're away. You might be pleasantly surprised. In fact, 85% of managers in a recent poll said they did not expect their employees to be available during vacation.
Are your fears ruining your vacation, or is it your boss? Sit down and talk to your boss about what is really expected while you're away. You might be pleasantly surprised. In fact, 85% of managers in a recent poll said they did not expect their employees to be available during vacation.
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