Time Off

Around this time of year, we get a run of long weekends and every year, I get a sense of expansion and release as the classic five day week is disrupted by bank holidays. All of a sudden you have the space to think and do things outside of the default two day weekend.

Also, for most of us, our main summer break is coming into view and we can look forward to a chunk of time away from work; once we get the pain of the pre-holiday workload out of the way.

That thought (along with the post-holiday penance work load) led me to think of how little slack we give ourselves when planning our time and other resources and how we often fail to accurately factor in time away from work in how we plan and agree to deadlines.

Not being realistic about the days we are away, means we often agree or default into unfeasible deadlines; and consequently pre-break-stress and post-break catch up.

So what can we do?

None of us are completely autonomous in how we plan our work and resources. We are all in some way at the mercy of other people in how and when we deliver. But within that limited space, it should be possible to flag the time that we will not be available and the knock on effects of that.

It should be possible to call attention to when your normal five day week is a three day week and when you’ll be out of the picture completely for a couple of weeks and deduct all that time from whatever time budget your stakeholders are using.

Whether you are a colleague or a manager, it's important for you to accept the reality of holidays. People are not going to be working and if you explicitly acknowledge that fact it would help people take and enjoy their time off.

In some organisations there can be a tendency to at once, wave people off and wish them a great holiday but still expect them to have all their usual work done without altering the time lines!

We need to accept the disruption caused by time off and have the confidence to remove that time from all our work calculations.

Time away is necessary and allowing people to go away and properly disconnect without worrying about timelines will ultimately benefit everyone in the organisation.