It feels like you can’t log off from work.
Things will fall apart without you.
The team will get stuck and not know what to do.
You’re constantly in meetings and in 1:1s … how can you take a vacation in the midst of all this?
What about the new feature launch next week!
Argh!
deep breath
You can log off. If you need permission from somebody, consider this what you need.
More to the point, the recent waves of layoffs across the industry in the last few years should illustrate that work can go on without you, and might decide to do so at any moment!
Setting that aside, part of managing other humans involves setting an example for them. If you’re in the work Slack while you’re in line with your family at Disney World (true life story!), what example does that set when you want to encourage your team to take their vacation days to rest, reset, and recharge?
Removing yourself from work also creates an opening for your team to grow – filling in the cracks and holes your absence creates. This creates a stronger team when you’re back from the most magical place on earth – wherever that might be for you.
Finally, truly unplugging helps illustrate to your team that you trust them to handle things without you. If that isn’t reality, fake it for a week, or until it becomes true.
Some tips, hacks and thought technologies to help you unplug and truly take vacation as an engineering team leader:
1. Actually take time off. I touched on this a bit when I wrote about the inherent fallacy of unlimited vacation policies, but American business culture has made it very difficult to take enough vacation from work and feel ok about it. But, just like with your team, you also need time away from work to reset the synapses, to hatch new schemes, and to generally let the coil unwind a bit. Take vacation. One week-or-longer chunk alongside smaller ones at minimum … but shoot for two or three spread throughout the year.
2. Try a trial balloon. If you’re really plugged in and in the weeds, you might worry about everything falling apart without you. Try taking a single day, or a morning to not check in at all. Or peace out for a Friday afternoon. It’ll be there on Monday.
3. Set expectations and boundaries. If you’re going to truly unplug, your team and colleagues need to know that’s your intention. In my case, I learned over the years to explicitly state that I’ll be offline and available via text or phone if there is an emergency that can’t wait until I’m back. I also took a few extra precautions …
4. Delete things. It took nearly two decades in this industry before I realized that if I have work stuff on my phone, I will look at work stuff on my phone. This defeats the purpose of getting away from work, since work is also a phone glance away no matter where in the world I might be. So, I delete Slack completely, remove work email from the phone, drop all the other work-related apps entirely so I can’t fire up Google Docs and edit stuff. Make work find you if they have to, you shouldn’t be able to stumble on it when you have a spare moment. There are far better things to look at from a sunny beach than the #deploy channel in Slack. Leaving your laptop at home also makes it less likely to feel the guilt of not checking in, but I understand if you might still need it in emergencies. Just make sure it’s not a heavy, bulky security blanket.
5. Try to work ahead, but extend grace. Before any lengthy vacation, if you’re anything like me, you’ll try to work ahead to get things done that you know will come up while you’re out. I always overcommit in this mode, thinking I can get more accomplished than I actually can. So, I leap into vacation pushing right to the line and stressing myself out to the max before aggressively pulling the plug. This is hard to do. I learned over time to commit to less not more leading into a vacation. I learned to schedule things for post-vacation later in the week of my return. I learned that I’m not going to get everything accomplished, and it’s better to delegate what I can.
6. Your self is more than your work. Ok. This is a deeper subject, and one that has required a lot of emotional and mental work on my part, but vacation is a great time to reflect on your sense of self away from work. It’s one reason I suspect many of us find it so hard to fully separate from work for a time – because then we’re forced to consider our lives outside of work, and we don’t always like what we see. So, spend some time being a bit selfish, do something for you – even if it’s just a few minutes on a beach, or a meet and greet with Chewbacca.
Work can wait, but you have to make it wait outside of your mind.
And if you see Chewie, give him a big hug for me.
