I have always wondered why it seems as though during the week prior to vacation you must complete two full weeks of work in order to 'earn' the right to leave for a period of time. Of course, once you arrive at your destination, you then feel the need to stay attached. This has really gotten much worse in the last few years with the addition of cell phones, laptops, and instant communication which seems to deluge us every moment of every day. Anyway, while on vacation we still check email and voicemail, make a few phone calls to assure that everything is going right, and may even be part of a conference call just to assure that all is really okay.As if this weren't enough, we come back from vacation and spend what seems like the longest week ever catching up on little things that people didn't do the way you would have the week you were gone. Typically, for me, these are all of the little things that I just handle and others don't know exactly how I do them. So I come back and spend the week getting little things done not only for the present week, but the week I'd been gone.
As I sat and thought about all of this, there were two things that really struck me about myself. The first goes back to my father and mother. My father was the County Attorney. This meant that there was never a time that people didn't stop him on the street or come to the house for advice. In fact, over the doorbell on the side of the house everyone used was a typed note saying simply, “Remember, free legal advice is worth exactly what you pay for it.” When mom and dad started looking for a place to go for family vacations, they looked far enough away that people couldn't just drop by to see them. In their case, this was Lake Okoboji in the Iowa Great Lakes system in northwest Iowa. It was close enough that we could get there in a day, but far enough away so people wouldn't just stop by. It worked wonderfully for them and as a family we had a great deal of wonderful family vacations - typically staying at the lakes in June which was not yet considered tourist season. So, like my parents before me, last week my family went to Maine, in a time that is not considered tourist season, and a place definitely far enough away that people couldn't stop by, but the experience was completely different. Now, don't misunderstand, we had a great vacation, but because of the way the world is today, the only days I escaped work were when the business was closed. We will come back to this in just a minute.
The second thing I learned last week (probably relearned) is that you can have the best possible team working with you and if you do not share everything which needs to be done on a regular basis, you will still feel alone. Our Lean Consultant refers to this as “heroic management,” and I believe he is right. I have a great team of people with whom I work, but there are a bunch of things that rather than teaching, I just handle myself. These are the things I have to catch up on when I get back, and the things that make the first week back after a vacation such a struggle.
Back to relativity. Based on the way that I behaved, both getting ready for and coming back from vacation, I changed the way both of those weeks felt. After the first, I felt as though I needed a vacation to recover, and after having time with family and friends, I came back and put myself through the grinder, making it feel as if I had never taken a break at all when I finally arrived at my weekend.
What am I going to do with all of this new found, or re-found, information? I am going to try to learn from my parents and find a way to vacation where people cannot reach me as easily. In the world that we live, this is not geographical, this is attitudinal. Between now and the next vacation I take, I will work diligently to make sure my team knows about all of the weekly functions I accomplish. With that, I will work to be more willing to leave the cell phone and the iPad sitting on a table and just enjoy the vacation.
It will be interesting to see how I do with this.
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