The Bright Side of Time Off

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side of things, looking at positives, finding that silver lining in those black storm clouds. This episode may be a little confusing because we're going to look at the bright side of time off. Yes, you heard that correctly. The bright side of time off. Now, I think most people would say, well, that's pretty foolish. Time off is awesome. We love having time off, but do we really? I think a lot of us in the tech world in particular find it very difficult to take time off. Basically one, we don't really take time off. We tend to stay connected. We tend to continue to try to keep up. We use quote time off to almost catch up on things that we feel like we're falling behind on. There's that flurry of activity and things that we need to do when we come back from that time off period that often makes it almost not worth going away. I know more people than not. I would say vast majority of people I know in the technical world, especially when young, end up selling back their vacation time or find a way to cash out or something like that or just let it accumulate if they can because they would rather not. There's other issues. Maybe they don't have enough money to go on vacation or whatever, but it just don't take the time off. There is a negative I think that we see with time off and that being that we're away from our work and that we may fall behind and then we've got to catch up. Sometimes it's just the negative of we can't really, we think, get away from work because wherever we go, we've got a phone, we've got email, we've got something that's bothering us. We get interrupted too much. Sometimes that itself is a reason to not take a vacation. As you look at it and you say, I'd love to go for a hike, go hang out in the mountains and get disconnected for a couple of days, but that means I'm disconnected for a couple of days and I won't have people able to get a hold of me when they need to. We find arguments against it. Rather than beat up on vacations too much, let's look at the bright side. This may also be things that you should get out of a vacation or time off if you're doing it right. I'm not sure that many of us are. The first thing is refreshment, is rejuvenation, is feeling less burned out, having more energy, even having a higher sense of, let's say, purpose or morale or drive to get things done. I think that when you do it right, you get away from what you enjoy doing, assuming that you enjoy your job to some extent. There's something about that that is allure. If not, get another job. There's enough things out there and life's too short. You should be somewhere that you essentially enjoy your work. Not always, not all of us do, but enough that if you go away from it, you feel like something's missing. This is one of the goals. When you take a real vacation, not necessarily, and a lot of times you can't in like a, say, three-day weekend kind of vacation, I mean, probably a week, I'd say minimum, then you get far enough away that you wind down from your daily grind and you're able to actually embrace that time off. Even when you come back to work, it takes a little bit of time to sort of ramp back up. Well, during that time that you're away from work, you're doing things that you normally aren't, hopefully, and those things that you normally do, now you're not doing them. There should be that, almost that gravitational pull to come back and do the norm when you get back. You should feel refreshed. You should be able to jump into that first day back or that second day back and say, I've been away from this for a while. I want to get back and start being productive, getting things done, doing this thing that I chose for a career, for a profession. If you do it right, one of the positives of vacation is that you actually will be more motivated coming out of it. Another thing, and this sort of, we've already sort of led into this a little bit, another positive is that you get to attack things that have been on your bucket list or your to-do list for a long period of time, but have been sitting because you simply can't get to them. These are not necessarily life-altering things. It may be read a certain book or maybe even binge watch a show or go on a trip to a certain location or even even eat a meal at a place that you normally wouldn't be able to have the time to or you go to a museum or check out a park or countless other things. There's things that we have on our bucket list or our to-do list that we would like to do, but the daily grind don't allow us to do that. A vacation allows us to take some of those bigger chunks of things. So if you wanted to travel abroad, if you wanted to go spend a couple of days at your favorite amusement park, if you wanted to go travel up or down a river, if you wanted to go sailing for a couple of days, camping, things that are multi-day efforts that you normally wouldn't be able to do because you don't have that kind of time. You can't take that time away from your work except as part of a vacation. So if you're doing it right, one of the things that you should get out of your vacation is the ability to do something you normally wouldn't. And that goes back to why a three-day vacation probably isn't really, you know, a three-day weekend probably not going to be a real vacation. I mean, you may be able to go, you know, do a, maybe I'll go like, you know, go to Paris for a day or two or whatever. You know, you can do, you can knock some bucket things off with a day or two, but the bigger things that you really can't get to unless you have multiple days, several days to do it, then those are the things that you should be taking advantage of and knocking out in your vacation. And it may be things that you just can't do, that you technically could do in a day, but it's just not worth it. For example, you know, maybe snow skiing, something that I've done on and off over the years. If you go for a day once a year, you know, you can spend most of that day just, you know, getting comfortable again and getting used to the altitude and the equipment and how to ski. You're not really going to be able to enjoy it unless you can have, you know, string together several days. That may be the same case for, it's definitely the same case for some of the museums. If you want to go to cities that have a lot, maybe like a Chicago or Washington, DC or Paris or London or places where there's just tons and tons of things to do and museums and history and places to see, then you're not going to be able to do it in a day or two. So those kinds of things, you can really take advantage of that in a true vacation and longer trips. You know, if it takes you a day or two days, just travel time to get to a destination, then obviously you're going to take several days to enjoy that. And so that's another positive of a vacation. And again, true vacation is that you get to do some things before, essentially before retirement that you otherwise wouldn't. Now there are other ways around that. If you ever want to go back, if you've read or go reread, if you haven't read or read or reread, however you want to do it, the four hour work week, he talks a lot about semi-retirement and partial retirements and things like that, where you basically go and live somewhere for multiple months because you have a remote job and use that to really, you know, explore the world and enjoy life. Well, we can do that easier now with remote work and things of that nature. But vacationing is where we can really, really embed ourselves into an environment. So that's another positive for vacation is that, you know, one, we can refresh ourselves. We can remote ourselves. Two, we can knock things off of our bucket list or our to-do list that have been sitting around for a while. And that itself can reduce some level of stress or worry or just general annoyance. I've been there where you've got something on your to-do list and it's been on that list day in and day out, months, years. And finally you're like, okay, I got to do this thing. I've got to get this thing done. vacations is it allows us and some may say even forces us to actually pick our head up from our work and look at things in the world, things in life that are not our job. It may actually lead us to enjoy our life more, to appreciate life more. And again, like time, the quality of your life is a huge factor. That's a big thing. If you have a high quality life all the way from birth to death, you win the game of life. If you have a low quality life, you can have a billion dollars and all this kind of, but if your quality of life is not that great, then you basically lose at the game of life. So vacation allows us to actually go out there and experience some other things and actually improve our quality of life. Now we may end up having to use vacation in support of others, but I think we still get that. For example, you may have a sick relative, something along those lines where you have to go be a caregiver for a while. So you have to take some vacation time to go either, and it could be sick or it could be, for example, if somebody is going to be a parent in your family and so you're going care of mom, dad and the baby a little bit, help them out for a while. There's all those kinds of things where you're giving to somebody else. Or you could be one of these, for example, Doctors Without Borders, one of these things where you make it a charitable endeavor, where you utilize your skills for the less fortunate. And I think even that, I haven't done that being completely clear on this. I haven't done that, but the people I've talked to that have, it is still a vacation. It is still refreshing. There's something that is different in the rewards when you know you're giving and not being paid to do it. It's just an interesting kind of thing, which that actually leads to another positive. When we have a vacation, we get to try these different things out. We get to wear life for a little bit without our job. We need to try it on for size and see how it fits. And we get to play around with those things that we may want to do. Maybe we want to work on our golf game. Maybe we're a golfer and so we get to golf every day for however long our vacation is. Or snow skier and we get to ski. Maybe we just go out to some out in the hills somewhere and read books for a week or whatever it is. The key is that we get to try things out and actually figure out what we want to do when we're done growing up, when we retire. We get to see what's out there so that we do get to a point, and hopefully we all get get to a point where we don't have our job as our main consumer of our time, then we've got some ideas of where we want to go with it. I think part of the reason that there's statistics that people that, particularly men, women feel different, it's changing, but men in particular, a lot of times don't live terribly long after they retire. Now we're seeing it, we are seeing it in women as well, particularly career women, as you just get so that your life is your job. When they retire, there's no life, there's no reason, there's no purpose. I think if you do vacations right, then you will figure out what your purposes are beyond work, which can feed back into your work as well. This goes back to that whole knowing your why. Why do you get up in the morning and go to work? Why do you choose a career you do, the profession you do? Why do you work for the company you do or with the people that you do? Now it may be something very simple, but hopefully there's more to it than because those are the people that pay me or something like that, or that's how I pay my bills. Because somewhere along the way, you need to know what is it that you want to do with your life when you're not just paying the bills. It may be as simple as asking yourself the question, okay, let's say I win the $50 billion lottery or whatever it is, life-changing amount of money, then what? What would I do at that point? Because those kind of, you may just say, well, I'll just keep working. Maybe that's fine, but maybe not. Maybe there's some other things out there in the world that you would be better off doing those a little bit, or at some point as a, you know, even full-time. Maybe you want to be, maybe your end calling in your life is to go be a Walmart greeter. I don't know. There's a lot of options out there, but a vacation allows you to maybe try some of these things out and figure out what it is you really like. And like I said, all of this feeds back into making you better at your job, which is why along with a couple other reasons, but which is why a lot of companies have vacation policies. They know that they can't work us, you know, even 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, even if you take in the, even if you knock out the days that you get for holidays, it's just too much. We have to have time to get away and recharge. That's why there are definitely companies out there that either, you know, one, won't pay you for unused time in an effort to get you to take that time off, or some actually mandate it, which has been really interesting because I've known people that have been stuck in a situation where they've got a lot of time off and now they're mandated to use it and they really struggle. It's not uncommon for them to say, okay, well, I'm just going to do a three-day weekends until I've, I've burned through my, my time off, which works, but again, defeats the purpose. Take a longer period of time, take enough time to actually shake off your job. And you'll find that vacation is something different than maybe you think it is. Vacation is not necessarily a nuisance that interrupts you from getting your job done. It actually may be something that is a refreshing change of pace that allows you to come back and get your job done better. So I don't want to belabor the point too much, but do it right. And so that's the challenge of the week. When was the last time you took a vacation that let's say spanned more than five days, five consecutive days and not including Christmas or Thanksgiving, you know, the holidays that sort of ping on how they fall typically will give you, you know, the equivalent of a, you know, three, three, two, three days off. So you get like a five, four or five day weekend. When was the last time that you actually took a vacation, not just holidays, but you took a vacation five days or more. And if it's been a long time or never, then the challenge is to schedule one and the next year set some, some time, figure something out and actually plan a vacation of a reasonable amount of time and see what happens. It was life-changing. I think, yeah, it was life-changing when many, many years ago I looked at the calendar and realized I could take four days of vacation off the way New Year's and Christmas fell that year. I could take like four days of vacation time and get two weeks off just how things fell. I said, all right, I'm going to give it a try. That was an awesome two weeks. I literally got probably one of the best vacations I've had in, in I don't know how long. And that got me thinking that I needed to do that more often. And I haven't been, I haven't done as many as often as I would have liked. I've had things come up way too often and have said, no, I'm going to pass on the vacation and go do work stuff or whatever else. But still I think it's something that's very valuable. I'm glad that I did it. And I hope that maybe some of you out there do the same thing that you realize that vacation can be a very valuable thing to do and to utilize. And that being said, since you're probably not on vacation, it's time to get back to work, but go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go. Developer Noir podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. 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