How to holiday when you have a work phone.

You’ve worked your backside off throughout the year, you have navigated lockdowns and endless meetings around Covid related risk management. The holidays are finally here, but in your role you are never really not on call to some degree – sound familiar? For those of us in the technology game that’s out lot – so how do you make the most of your holidays when “that phone call” can always happen?

Well the first thing is, you need to not worry about that phone call.  It may come, it may not – you can’t control that happening so why worry about it?  There is literally nothing to be gained from focusing on this and worrying about it.  You are on holiday, you are part of a team – people will understand that you may not have been available at that time and if things are bad they will get hold of someone.

The second thing is, I am pretty sure that you will have a structure in place for dealing with bad things happening over the holiday periods – if you haven’t, well you’ve had a year to put that in place so this blog may not be for you!  But seriously, you have structures, you have great team mates and I hate to break it to you – but the world will not end if you are unreachable!

What about keeping up with emails?  I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to this, thankfully over the new years period the emails do drop to a trickle and the teams chatter dies right away, so make the most of this.  But if you MUST check in, make time for this, and don’t do it again until you have an allocated time to check again.  For me, that’s an hour in the morning each day that I leave “open” to checking emails and chats.  It never takes me an hour, but I give myself that time for IF something does come up that needs time spent.  Outside of that hour, I’m not checking emails again until the next morning.

The best advice of course is to switch off the phone, chuck your laptop in the drawer and just go totally offline – and if you can do that, I applaud you! But if you feel like you can’t, limit your time to check in and don’t plan your holidays around always being available.  Only you can choose to relax, no one else can do that for you. Make the right choice.

Its not rocket science, there are no secrets to relaxing on holiday – its just a mindset, choose the right one.

Enjoy your holidays – I intend to.