I’m on vacation this week, out west visiting my family. I’m doing the stuff you do out here: Spending time at the pool, reading, taking afternoon naps, firing up the grill.
But I’m also working, pretty much every weekday morning, for a few hours.
This isn’t supposed to be some sort of treatise on the importance of hustle, some #nodaysoff mission statement. I’m a unique case: I’m in my 30s, I don’t have kids, and I run a one-person business — one I’ve built to serve a lot of small clients (instead of a few big ones). What I’ve done in the past is the traditional vacation: Shut down the laptop, turn on the out-of-office reply, and then return a week or two later to dive back in.
But with Inbox Collective, I’ve discovered that if I shut down everything for a week or two, here’s what happens:
1.) I return to a million unanswered emails (since there’s no one else clients can redirect their questions to).
2.) The week before vacation and the week after vacation are absolutely stacked with meetings, as clients try to squeeze in time before I leave.
The last time I took a week off, I spend the entire week stressed out about how much work I had the next week. I seemed miserable the entire trip.
So I’m making adjustments. On recent trips, I’ve tried to carve out a little time in the morning — about 2-3 hours — to reply to emails and take calls. I’ve blocked off every afternoon for myself, and I’ve turned on my out-of-office reply so people know I’m not going to write back right away. And it’s working: My inbox is manageable, my schedule when I return from vacation is fairly normal, and once the clock hits about 11 a.m., I shut down the laptop and head out do to something fun.
It seems a little odd to still do some work on my time off. But if this is what I need to do to make sure I actually enjoy the time off — to work 10-15 hours a week, even on vacation — then it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.
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That’s a photo of me, on one of my afternoons off, on the golf course. A beautiful day, but a pretty terrible lie for that particular shot.