It’s Time For A Break - Here’s How To Actually Take One

For many, the holidays present (pun intended) precious time away from work to connect with friends and family, relax, and recharge. For others, it’s largely business as usual, made even more hectic and stressful by holiday obligations. The good news is that even small breaks from the daily grind can go a long way in filling your tank.

Here are strategies for hitting the ground running post-holiday:

TAKE TIME TO PREPARE

The holidays require a fair amount of preparation (those gifts don’t wrap themselves) and so does taking time off. Now is the time to assess your current workload and the status of key deliverables. Some questions to consider:

• What deadlines need to be hit before the first of the year, and what can wait?
• What do you need to complete so team members with different schedules can advance work while you’re out?
• Do you want to make yourself available for quick questions, and how would you like to receive them? If not, what constitutes an emergency, and how can your team contact you if there is one?

Next, be sure to set your out-of-office notifications clarifying who should be contacted for urgent matters, or how often you’ll be checking email if you’re staying connected. Even if your office shuts down during the holidays, your clients and collaborators may not. Remember that you can create different replies for internal and external senders.

To make your re-entry a little easier, consider setting email rules before you go. You can automatically forward emails from key people to a colleague who is covering for you, route any emails on which you're just copied to a low priority folder, and color-code emails that came only to you as your top priority.

USE YOUR TIME OFF WITH INTENTION

Managing the stress and commitments that come with the holidays is a whole other article (and there are plenty of them, I promise), so I’ll just share an anecdote here instead. I once had a boss, you might call him a workaholic, who would email me over the holidays posing high-level strategic questions. I suspect this was so he could take a break from family activities.

While I know a thing or two about avoiding family, there are better things to do than stress out your colleagues. Take a nap. Walk your dog. Read a book. Hide in the basement. Stare out the window. Be quiet for 10 minutes. Don’t spend your precious break being reminded of the work that awaits, because then it’s not a break at all.

HAVE A PLAN FOR RE-ENTRY

Coming back to a full inbox is never fun, especially if your team has been moving at full speed while you were out. Here’s the trick: consider coming back a day earlier than your calendar indicates and use that time to quietly get caught up. Clue in one member of your team and spend an hour getting a download on what has progressed and what needs priority attention.

If you’ve all been on holiday, book time together mid-morning to get reoriented to work underway, identify any new work that’s come in, and decide / delegate what needs to be tackled right away. Starting the year off with shared clarity feels much better than trying to shake off the holiday amnesia on your own.

One last note – if you’re the one who tends to cover for everyone else’s holiday time off, first of all, thank you. And second, be sure to book your own time off once folks are back, even if it’s just a day or two. We can’t be at our best if we don’t get our rest.