Making the Most of Your Time Off

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-A-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are getting near the end of 2021. Yes, it has been a slog. It's taken a while. We're almost here or almost there. This episode is one of our little special holiday kind of episodes. And this time I want to talk about making the most of your time off. Now we talk a lot about productivity and getting things done and things like that. But one of the problems that I have run into, and maybe this is just me, is I get to the end of a break. And usually not a three day weekend because that's just not long enough. But if I take a week off, or even if I get a four or five day weekend, something that's a little bit more time, it's amazing how often I get to the end of it and look back and go, wow, that just flew by and I don't feel like I rested enough. Or I, for lack of a better term, accomplished the things I wanted to accomplish. And those accomplishments are not necessarily productivity accomplishments. It may be things like I wanted to watch a movie. I wanted to read a book. I wanted to go for a walk. I wanted to cook a meal that I normally don't have time to cook. Things like that. Now it probably will not surprise you that one of the ways that we can try to save ourselves from this is putting together a nice little list. It is a, it's sort of sad again, but it's a to do list for your time off. Don't be afraid to create a little list as you're going into that time off, that long weekend, that one or two week longer vacation, or longer vacation. If it's not a destination vacation kind of thing, that's one thing if you're going to go to an amusement park and you've got certain rides that you want to hit or certain shows that you want to see or a sightseeing tour kind of thing where there's certain places you want to go and things you want to see, those tend to, they tend to resolve themselves. We have a list. Yeah, we may not make it to everything on the list, but more or less we're going to be working our way through it. And if we don't, then we turn around and say, all right, we'll go visit that place another time and we'll, we'll work our way through the list then. This is more about just vacate, just time off, time off, not going anywhere. You don't have any major things that are, you know, events that are going on during this. It's just days to relax. But that doesn't mean during your relaxation that you don't have essentially some goals. Maybe you want to, like I said, maybe you just, maybe it's as simple as you want to, I want to soak in a tub or, you know, like I said, maybe catch up on your reading, flip through some magazines, talk to people you haven't talked to in a while, those sorts of things. Now what I've found, and this goes back many, many, many, many years to summer vacation as a kid, when you'd have, you know, you'd be in the roughly May kind of timeframe and you look ahead and you're like, wow, I've got June and July and part of August before I ever have to get schooled again. I've got all this free time and all this stuff that I want to do. And the next thing you know, you're in school again. I know maybe some of those things got done, but especially as I got older, right before I got, you know, when I got to the point where I sort of had some goals of some sort, but before I was the point where I had work to do. And even then when I went from school to work, usually there was more free time during summer while I was working than there was during school year because you know, you got to do homework and all that kind of stuff. And so I get to the end and there's things that I said, oh, yeah, I really wanted to do this. I really wanted to do that. Now for myself, it does include things that are work or productive or something like that. Hey, I want to do, I want to clean out that closet that's been bothering me for a while or hey, I want to organize some photographs or videos from the last year, you know, the family events and things like that. Maybe I want to knock out thank you cards or holiday cards or birthday cards or things of that nature. There's those sorts of tasks that can easily get lost in our day to day work stuff, particularly if we've got a pretty full schedule. That time off is a perfect time to do it because they're not the same as work. We're exercising a different part of our brain. We're doing things a little differently and it allows us to get stuff done, but also refresh so that we're ready at the end of the break to dive back in full force again. Now this is a vacation. It should be a break. It should be a rest. It should be not inducing stress. So a list in itself can induce some stress, I guess. You look at stuff and say, oh, I got to get up and do this. I got to get up and do that. I like to keep my list for vacations a little more softer or casual or something like that. So I'm not going to necessarily put things on the list, I want to do this every day or anything like that. But it is things like, you know, somewhere sometime during this, here's a couple of things I want to do. And it may be, I say, it could be things like catching up on an errand or doing some shopping or something like that. And what it does, instead of looking at it as a, oh, I got to do this, is I think it works a little better when you just, you know, you get up on each day and you just say, what I want to do today? Because presumably you don't really have anything you have to do. So it gives you something to look at and say, hmm, this would be cool to do today, particularly if you've got a week or two weeks. So, you know, weather and other things may impact what's going on. And if you do that from the start, I think it's more likely that those things will get accomplished at some point. Or when you're done, you will have made a choice each day to say, I really don't, that's not that important. I really don't want to do that. I want to do something else. And it may just be, I want to sleep in and lay around all day. That is perfectly fine. But by giving yourself a sort of a suggestions box or something that says, you know, during this time, I've got some free time. Here's something I haven't done in a while that I think would be fun. Maybe I want to put together a jigsaw puzzle, stuff like that. Putting those things on the list, even fun things will help you not just sort of sleep away the day or lounge away the day unless you are intentional about it, unless you choose to do so. And if you're like me, where lounging is, I don't know, it has limits to what it can do for me. I could lay around for a few hours, half a day, maybe a day, but I'm going to be itching to do something after that. And then do something maybe not what most people would consider doing much. Maybe I want to watch a movie or I want to listen to some music that I hadn't listened to in a while. It's something like that that just doesn't fit the normal work schedule, but ideally is fun or recharges you in some way. It's a reward because it should be your time off should be a reward for that time that you were working. You're giving up working right now and part of it is because you have been working up until this point, up until your vacation or your holiday and you've, we'll put it in quotes, but essentially you've earned the day off. We weren't built to work 24-7. We have to sleep, we have to rest, we have to do other things. And we know as we've talked about through burnout and death marches and things like that, that we do not work, we do not do our best work when we are tired or frustrated or just beat down by life. So let's go into our holidays, our lighter periods, our recharge periods and actually put together some stuff to say these are things that if I do them, they will recharge me. I will feel better for it. And as we're near the end of a year, a follow up to that is the idea of are there maybe some of these things that I don't do regularly because they're just not in my schedule that maybe it would help me a lot to put those into my schedule. The most obvious things I guess are things like regular exercise. Go out and exercise two, three times a week so that your body just feels a little better. You get the endorphins running, you just generally are going to feel better. There's all kinds of research on exercise helping you mentally and physically obviously and even emotionally and mentally and things like that. So maybe there's some things that you do during this time that you realize you haven't done those very much, but they are something that you enjoy and that it is worth it to spend on a regular basis because the time you invest in it, it recharges you more so. An example from my own life is I decided a year ago basically that I had not read for fun, for leisure for probably decades. It was just one of the things I used to do. Ran out of time. I was just too busy and realized that I had books that I had bought over the years that I hadn't even cracked open. I decided, you know what, I'm going to start reading again. Just a little bit. I'm going to do 10, 15 minutes a day, maybe four bed. I'm just going to read. It made quite a difference. It changed a lot in my just general mental, I don't know what it is, my mental, it's not really outlook necessarily, but my just mental status because one, it was a, essentially it's a reward each day that I get a little bit of that time to just unplug. And then it also is a mental change. It's something that's testing different areas of my head that allows me to relax the always thinking part of it. And instead allows me to tap into, hey, it's really more the creative side and which is fulfilling to me. So I get this like daily reward of just doing a little bit of something and that reward drives me to the, through the day. It's something to look forward to. And then when I get to the end of the day, while I am still winding down essentially in preparing myself for sleep and things like that, this is an exercise that actually really detaches me from work. So I've got something to think about that's not work. I don't end up dwelling on the events of the day. I have this other thing that allows me to, it's a nice distraction. Some people will watch TV, throw a TV show on particularly like the news or anything, but just some sitcom or something that is lighter fare to distract them and just be a way to get away from whatever you've been thinking through, worrying about pondering on during the day. I find books are even better because then I don't have the bright lights and all the other stuff that again, there's some people that say that's, there's research that says that that doesn't help necessarily. Some people would argue differently. That's not really the point. The point is more that through my vacation time and realizing, you know, a year ago, basically when I had some time off, realizing that, wow, I really do like just sitting down and reading a book, then I said, you know what, I'm going to do this on a regular basis. And it turned into something that is now very much a habit. And it's something to think about as you're going through this list of things that I want to do during my time off. I think a very valid question is why don't I do these when it's not my time off? Now some things may be too big, but even then, for example, my attic bothers me at times, particularly past house I was in, we just piled stuff in. And so if I ever needed to go to the attic for anything, it just, it bothered me because you couldn't find anything. It was just boxes and boxes and boxes. That was not going to be a small project. But what I did is ended up deciding, you know what, I'm, because it bothers me and because it actually makes me feel better to get some of that stuff dealt with, I would just go on a Sunday afternoon for, this lasts for months. I go spend like an hour. I'd bring a little, you know, bring my tablet up, watch an episode or two of a sitcom or whatever I was watching at the time. And while watching the show, I would be essentially sort of going through a box. I'd take a box, sort through it and maybe organize some stuff. A lot of cases I was throwing stuff out, so I was loading up a trash can. And over time, you know, like everything else, a little bit here, a little bit there makes a difference. And so think about that with fun things as well, with things that you want to do. Maybe you can't, maybe you can't exercise every day, especially during the work week. You know, maybe Monday through Friday, you're getting up, you're having to get in the road, you're at the office by the time you get home, you're exhausted. Well then, you know, maybe make Saturday and Sunday that you spend a little time and you run over to the gym or you go for a walk or a run or a bike ride or whatever it is that you do. Take a look at this list and as an extra bonus to yourself, maybe a year end gift to yourself, look at one or two of those things that you don't do, that you want to do, and spend a little time trying to figure out how you can work those in so it's not a year before you do them again. Something to think about and hopefully, like it did for me, this gives you a couple of epiphanies and you make some changes and your life is just a little bit better. You're not just a better developer, you're better as a person, a happier, closer to content and joyful person if you're not already there. That being said, I am going to wrap this one up, keep it a little bit short-ish, I guess. As always, go out there, have yourself a great day, a great week, a great holiday, a great end of the year, and I will come back for one more and then it's going to be 2022. Have yourself a good one. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. 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