PTO Taking Breaks - Why You Need More Than a Long Weekend

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season. We're building better businesses, but actually the podcast is Building Better Developers. The original title of this was Developer, but if you ever ask one of your woman in the box, one of those devices to play the developer podcast, they have problems with it. So that's why we also are building better developers because that one they will say. And if you say that, if I were to say that right now and you had one of those devices, it would actually start playing the most recent episode. Pretty cool stuff. That's technology. Also, cool stuff. I am Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of developer, better and better developers. Also a founder of RB consulting where let's face it, technology, technology sprawl is exhausting. If you are not any technology world, if this is not something that you do as your daily bread, basically I've been doing technology for decades. My team has been working in technology also for long periods of time. This is what we do. We eat it for breakfast. We know what's out there and we help you because we sit down with you. We understand. We like, we want to understand your business because everybody is unique. Every business is unique. We sit down, we craft a unique recipe for success for you based on the technology that is out there. And we also set it up so that you're prepared for whatever is going to come six months, a year, six years from now. We use integration, simplification, automation, innovation, and just helping you build the right team, the right army to go to war with for the technology you need for your business. That is our secret sauce as we understand yours and we find the best way to use technology and leverage it for whatever it is that you need. Good things and bad things. Good thing is it has been a day. This is one of those I'm just going to get like really, I'm going to get real with you guys, you listeners, me, familia. You guys have been here for a long time. You have seen me through thick and thin. We have talked to all kinds of different people through interviews over the years. We've covered all kinds of topics. Today is one of those days where you get to end of the day and we're just exhausted. If you're a developer, if you are in business, if you are solving problems, I think it can be hard for other people to understand how much getting to the end of the day can just have you ready to go have a drink, chill out, watch the sunset, whatever it happens to be. That's where we're at. At this point, it is very late in the day and I switched over to adult beverages sooner probably than I should have. So the good thing is that I do have the adult beverages, that I have this opportunity to vent, that I have Michael on the other end that is able to like, we can talk, we can chat, we can talk about all that, share our experiences. We haven't cried, but we could have cried together about some of this stuff. And that's a good thing. The bad thing is that I've gotten to the end of the day and it's just exhausting. A better thing is that now Michael is going to go introduce himself. The guy that I just like set the table for, go ahead and introduce yourself and let us know what's going on with you. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders of developerner, Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Invision QA where we take test-driven development and we apply that to software development to help small to mid-sized companies, clinicians, doctors, whoever. Look at the software you're using, look at your office, look at your company, and we make sure that what you are using to try to run your business works for your business. We will do a full assessment of your software. We will get into the nitty and gritty. We will get down and dirty with you and we will help you figure out if at the end of the day what you're paying for really is helping you, hurting you, or if you need to pivot, buy something else or build something specific for your needs. That is where we come in. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, having a great time with Rob tonight. We are way off the rails. So enjoy this podcast. Bad thing is, well, we are off the rails. No, we're off the rails. I'll leave it at that. Thank you. We're going to talk about, this is so timely. We are sometimes smarter than we think with some of our topics. We're going to talk about PTO. Talk about taking a little time, chilling out, getting away from your work. The subject line or whatever is basically like PTO is not just for employees. That's sort of like the catch, the hook that Michael threw out when he said, hey, here's a topic and I agree. This is a really challenging topic for me in particular because I will preach it, but I don't do it. Now let me set the table a little bit. My company, and I had this a little bit in the pre-show I talked about this, in my company, there is no such thing as PTO. I mean, it is, but we don't track it actually. If you need to take a day off, you take a day off. You need to take a half a day off, you take a half a day off. Part of this goes to me and I just, I get tired of red tape and the accounting side of that stuff. Part of it goes to my team works. My team gets crap done. And so if they need to take a day off for whatever reason, if they need to, and a lot of times, honestly, I have to push them to take a week off or some serious amount of time because their days off are like, you know, births, deaths, weddings, the things that you have to take a day off for. They like, it is very rare. Actually. Okay. Or video game. Yeah, we don't do that. So God bless her. Natalie said when we were sitting down and putting together the like holiday calendar for RB consulting, she said, you need to make sure that everybody automatically gets their birthday off. And I said, WTF, nobody does that because I don't even know my birthday half the times. I there have been there have been years. It has been days after my birthday. I'm like, oh, I just had a birthday. And God bless her. She's right. We need to do that kind of stuff. So there's things like that, that you should take a day off. Now, as a business owner, I'm going to throw another, there's a good thing, bad thing. So I was going to take a day off this Friday, a couple of days from now. And the person on the other end of the internet that is happens to be the cohost of this because we're working on a project. He was like, Hey, actually he was not the one that did this. So I'm not going to throw under the bus, but it was like, Hey, we need to get together. We need to have an offsite. We need to do some stuff. We need to do like these things, which totally agree. A hundred percent need to get those stuff done. This Friday that I was going to take off probably was not the day was the last day I wanted to do it. But when I looked at my schedule ahead, I'm like, yes, we need to do it on Friday. So I am, I am preaching not to the choir. I am preaching to the choir that is walking out of the church right now, because. I struggle to take PTO. I struggle to take time off in the last five years. This is like confession time right now in the last five years, the time that I have taken off where I was not working during the vacation, I think is like maybe twice in five years. The most recent one was not too long ago because my wife said, you will not take a laptop with you. No matter how much I tried, she's like, you will not take a laptop with you. I will throw it off the boat. And she probably would have. And so I took four days, five days. It ended up being five whole days that I did not touch my laptop. My laptop was crying when I got back to it. It said, why do you forget me? Where did you go? No, it didn't. It didn't give a squat because like I said, I was like, I'm going to go to the laptops have no personality. They are not people. So moral, that story is you can take time off. Another bonus of that is I took one of these employees that I was like, OK, I can probably trust him. He knocked it out of the park and ran the meetings. Nothing blew up. I got back, still had a business, still had employees. We were still like making payroll and all of the things that matter. And I say that because as a side hustler, as a entrepreneur and sometimes even as an employee, we do not take time off. We we think way too much of ourselves. We have to be here. We have to get this project done. This will not get done without us. And honestly, sometimes our a whole bosses will do that to us as well and say, I need you here. But you know what? You need to set boundaries. You need to realize that work is not the rest of your life. And honestly. Taking a break, getting away most often will actually end up improving your productivity as opposed to you working your butt off late at night through the weekend. This is something we've talked about before. You need to know when to step away. But PTO in itself, before I toss it over to Michael, that's one of these things that I think we underestimate it. And what I will throw in there is that a three day weekend is not going to cut it because we need time to decompress before we can actually relax. If you take a three day weekend Friday, you're still freaking out about all the stuff that didn't happen on Friday. Saturday, you're worried about all the stuff that you didn't get done on Friday. And you're thinking about all the stuff that should happen on Sunday. Sunday, you're thinking about crap. I'm going to get to work on Monday and there's going to be a tile pile of work. And Monday at like 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. You may finally chill out for a minute and say, wow, I just had a three day weekend and then boom, you're back into the next week. Take more time off. I will tell you, I will go to the mat on this one. Years and years and years and years and years ago, I took because of how it fell that year. I took a two week vacation at the end of the year. And then a couple of years later, I did it again when I have been able to take a real two week vacation, even a week and be like, I'm not thinking about work. Those are so refreshing, recharging. And I get back to work just like crying almost that I want to go back to work. That is a bike, the vacation, the PTO that you need to take. Do not get yourself in a situation. Although there is a benefit and there's a way that you can leverage this. If you get to the point where you're like, I have to spend my PTO because otherwise I'm going to lose it. And I know a lot of people that do this and they ended up taking three day weekends, like week after week after week, they just do four day work weeks to the end of the year so they can burn through their PTO. There is some that you can leverage that you can make that work. But that is not going to work as far as like sanity and recharging and stuff like that and actual rest of vacation. For example, I'm going to take rest of vacation. I'm going to take a sip of my drink and I'm going to pass it over. Michael, what are your thoughts on this? Because I know both of us suck at this. So I'm going to start out with a horror story. So I'm going to start out with one. So after college, I had a couple of jobs before I landed my first developer job. I had a couple of teaching jobs where life was actually pretty good. But then I got into what I thought was what I'd love to do, which honestly is, uh, I started working for this healthcare company in Nashville and seven year, or actually I worked there for about seven years and five years into the company working for the company, I took a week off, went with my wife. She had a business conference. I went with her to Vegas and I'm out climbing a mountain and get a phone call on the, as I'm hanging off this mountain that, oh shit, the, you know, stuff's on fire. I'm like, what do you mean stuff's on fire? The problem I had was I was the only person that did what I did at the company for seven years. They had, I had no backup. When you, it doesn't matter what you do. You need to be able to pull yourself out of the job and have a break. Six months after that incident, I quit that job. Now, did I learn my lesson? No. Um, we run into these situations in almost any company we work at. We want to be good at what we do. We tend to position ourselves depending upon where you're at or what you're doing and where you're at in your career, you position yourself to be very reliable or basically they can't eliminate you. Like you are, they have to have you, they have to be irreplaceable. Is that what you, um, you're irreplaceable. And unfortunately that's a bad thing for those of us that are want to start companies and build businesses. You need to build the business. You need to build things in such a way where you can remove yourself. You are not the linchpin that runs the company. The company needs to run itself. You help facilitate the company. You help facilitate the growth of the company, but the company should not live, die or breathe on your existence. That should never happen. You need to eliminate yourself as the blocker of your business succeeding. Tim Ferris had a great statement of this when he talked about trying to sell his brain quit company where he could not extract himself. He had to figure out how to eliminate himself from the company. If he were to leave, how could he sell the company? You need to think in terms of that, wherever you are, be, you are an employee. You are a business owner. You are a developer. You are an entrepreneur. We need, we, we love what we do, but at the end of the day, we need to figure out how to reset Rob noses. This is where this topic came from. I am horrible at this. Absolutely horrible. I will take PTO to work on other things. We have to pay bills. We have obligations. We have things. We, there are things that always stack up. There are always something that needs to be done at the end of the day. What are you doing to be a better person? A better developer, a better person. A better business owner and a better like family man, husband, whoever. But we need to figure out what we want and it's not work. I talked about last episode. I took a stroll in the yard the other day and just like, what am I doing? You know, what am I working for? Why, why am I doing what I'm doing? And it's like, oh, trees, yard, land, birds, guineas that fricking do whatever the hell they want. Chickens that get eaten by dogs or coyotes, fish, turtles. Bottom line is we have one life. We stress about way too much crap. We don't care about, or really we have no control over. Take the time, take the PTO, take the break. You owe it to yourself to reset or we're going to burn out. We're going to fail. We're going to get into those cycles where, because we're not taking those pauses, we're going to get into those feedback loops where we are doing the same thing again and again and again, which is by definition insanity. You need to do different things over time. So please, if you get anything from this episode is PTO, vacation time, breaks. Pause. Take a step back from what you're doing every day. And it could be as simple as turn focus mode, like turn off your phones, turn off the video games, turn off the TV, do something different that helps you reset, helps you relax and helps you get back to the status quo, because at the end of the day, if you find yourself like, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing it. It's like, Oh, I'm busy, busy, busy. No, you do not want to be busy at work. You want to be productive. If you are not being productive at anything you're doing, you're doing it wrong. Take a step back, reset. What is it that you need to be doing? Do that or do nothing. Take a pause, call your boss and say, Hey, I need a break. I need a mental break. I need a sick day, something. If you find yourself cycling, step back, take a break. Pause. You know, that's where this whole idea of the PTO taking a break came from. We, especially as entrepreneurs, as owners, as you know, entrepreneur, you know, business owners, we run businesses, we are the business, or at least we think we are the business. And if the business, if we aren't there, the business will fail. That happens more times than you think in anything that we do, not just running a business. Pause, take a break. What is important to you in your life? And if you're not doing it, take a few days off, find it again. If you don't, you are missing out or you're burning out to the point that you are going to crash and burn and crash and burn. And crash and burn is not where do you want to be? That that is a sign that you need to walk it back. Thoughts for us? I, we have talked about burnout being devastating to us because we are all go, go, go kind of people. I I'm going to give you some, some thoughts on what I have found has worked for me may or may not work for you. And actually I've gotten away from it and I've realized how much it does work for me. Go back, flashback sometime in the past. I honestly don't even remember when I last was actually able to do this. I would work. I would basically get up about 6 AM in the morning and start work because I would do a lot of like pre-work stuff. So I had about an hour to like chill and get started on my day and about seven o'clock ish I would start work and then I would work until about 11 and start about seven, seven 30 and worked about 11, 11 30. So I get four hours in focused on usually one or two projects. And honestly, we've talked a lot about like the 15 minutes a day kind of stuff. Usually my first hour would be four 15 minute a day things that I wanted to make progress on. So I'd be like, made progress on eight B C D. So I would start my day by eight 30 in the morning. Usually I had like progress on the things I really want to progress on. And then I was into a project get to about 11 30 and I would break for lunch and I would have something to eat. I may make myself a meal. I may get a meal, whatever. I may go for a walk for a while. I would read for a little bit or something like that. I made, you know, something to chill and then about one, one 30 get back to work. I would take a nice long lunch break. We'll call it. And then from one one 30, I'd work till about five or five 30. Again, usually that was like my primary, whatever my primary job was. I'd spent a good four hours, like solid hours cranking on that. Maybe two projects. A lot of times it was just one get to the end of the day, five, five 30, whoever it was, maybe six, depending on how my day went done. I was free to do whatever I wanted the rest of the evening could go do whatever. Get to sleep at a decent hour, get up next morning, start it again, do it all over again. That is actually for me, that was a really good rhythm worked out well. Your wither rhythm may be a little bit different, but I'm going to guess that the blocks of time that I had in there are going to be roughly the same. You may be something that needs four blocks of two hours, one block of eight. I don't know. I don't know anybody that knows one block. Eight. Most people are like four blocks of two, maybe two blocks of four, something like that, because it goes back to the whole Pomodoro and some of those things, there's like only a certain amount of time that we can really focus on something before we need to step away from it. It becomes actually more productive to step away and stop than it does to continue beating your head against whatever that problem is. No, my recent schedule is I get up at, and I'm going by 6 a.m. I skip lunch. I don't do anything else but work until six or 7 p.m. Depending on the day. Sometimes I leave a little early. If I, if I leave early, I feel guilty the whole time that I didn't get work done. And if I work late, then I feel better. But then I work until I go to sleep. And that's a bad, and that is a good example of what not to do. Exactly. People around me, people that know me will tell you that is not the pleasant version of Rob. The one that I was before is what people want me to be. And honestly, it's what I want me to be because funny enough, I felt at the end of the day when I was doing that, like four to four kind of, you know, four hours of work, two hours of break, four hours of work, when I did that schedule, I got to the end of the day. And regardless of what I did, I always felt more productive than I do right now. Now part of it is I have overloaded my schedule. So that is something you need to take care of. However, PTO taking time off, realizing that just working at whatever it is, is not always the best way to approach it. Is where to go. What is the challenge you want to give our listeners for today? I'm glad you reminded me because I probably would have just like carried on and not done the challenge. Here's the challenge. This is, this is a challenge that we've actually talked about a lot, but I think it is worth wherever you are at. I think this is a challenge is really worthwhile. I've gone back to this recently and it was as long as I've been doing this, as much as I know a lot of my strengths and weaknesses and where I went to, this is actually was a very valuable challenge for me, exercise for me. And so I hope it is for you as well. The challenge is to sit down and think about what is your most productive schedule. I know this is getting a little bit, this drifting off of PTO, but it is like, are you a morning person? Are you a night person? Are you a middle of the day person? Are you a split your day person? Like for myself, morning, afternoon, I need the evening needs to be nothing, but whatever the heck I want to do, whether I want to play games or I want to go out, whether I want to sleep, whatever it is. One of my employees I know is very much a like, not early morning, maybe like a nine to one person and then like a nine to one person, big break. So mid morning, like normal work hours for people. And then like night out hours, I've got another employee best work hours are like probably like nine or 10 PM until like five, six AM just like shut out the world and just go do some stuff. So while this is not related to PTO, that's really the challenge. The side note PTO is when was the last, this is just really a question. It's an easy one. When was the last time you took more than four days off in a row without your technology and isn't it time that you do it now? That is where we at. Another thing it is time right now for you to send us an email at info at developer.com. I was like last episode. If you've been following along, Michael actually took over on the YouTube side. So you go check that out. He's going to do it again today. He doesn't know it, but he's going to because I thought he did a great job. Go for it. At info at developer.com Twitter or X at developer. We're on Facebook and LinkedIn at developer and please follow us, send comments, wherever podcasts are. Let us know what you think and please reach out. We will follow or reach out to you as soon as you send us something or whenever we see your comments. That is a perfect example of PTO. I'm actually going to go like log that I did whatever that was 30 seconds of PTO on my developer nor time card because that's what you need to do is you need to learn how to expand. I will wrap this one up because Michael did such a great job. So succinctly, I just want to let you guys know we do appreciate you. Thank you for hanging out with us. Please take some time off, protect your sanity because that is like the mental stuff is so much a part of our work. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers. Building better developers to develop a new podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.