Today is my first day back from being at Disney World for a week with my family. We had a wonderful time. It was awesome to see our 6-year-old light up seeing all the sights and ride for the first time.
This trip was also the first full week of vacation I have had in years. There was a lot going on at work and I found it really hard to unplug. I can’t tell you how many times I checked my email and Teams while waiting in line for one thing or another. I’m sure this amounted to less than 1% of the time I was off, but I feel like even that level of work is more than enough to lose some of the mental recoveries that vacation should provide.
Future Strategies
I think the biggest thing I could do in the future is different timing. This trip ended up being during a client go live which greatly added to the feeling that I needed to stay connected in case something went wrong.
Second, I need to take more time to ensure I’m not the single point of knowledge on any subject. The one thing I did end up having to do was because I forgot to convey some information on how our QA team was running a service.
Third, I just need to take more time off. As I said above this is the first time in years that I have taken a full week off. This has been due to family medical issues and it has gotten me in the habit of saving all the time off I can to cover times I need to be out to help out the family. Now that things have calmed down I am going to have to adjust to being able to have time off and disconnecting.
Wrapping Up
I’m still in the process of getting back into the swing of things and this topic was on my mind. I would love to hear how you all deal with this issue.
Also published on Medium.