Take Your Vacation for Personal Accountability

Accountability: anything or anyone that helps us gain mental leverage to achieve the results we desire. —The Accountability Stop

Have you ever heard someone at your workplace say, “I had to cancel my vacation. I have too much work to do.” No one in my office is policing vacation time or insisting that anyone skip theirs. The people I know who cancel vacations do so because they refuse to be accountable about taking vacation.

I found a random study online that asked why people don’t use their vacation time. “Understaffed” or “workload” accounted for 66% of the responders not taking all their vacation time. Are so many people really tied to their jobs? Or are we telling a story that we are so indispensable that we can’t leave? If we find ourselves canceling our vacation, how do we get more accountable about it?

Buy Tickets

I suggested before that we can buy tickets to force ourselves to actually leave on vacation. It’s a great motivator. Make hotel reservations or buy plane tickets. I often buy theater tickets at my destination so my timing is locked in. 

Are You Single?

When we’re young and just starting a career, our time tends to be flexible. We can easily work late and start early. We can shift a trip home to see the parents by a few days and no one is bothered. While it can be convenient to inconvenience ourselves as single people, it can start to feel like a burden as more coworkers get married and have kids. If (maybe when) we start feeling resentful that we’re always the ones making concessions in our lives for the convenience of others, then we shouldn’t make ourselves feel guilty about scheduling time for our own break from the grind.

Promise Your Friends

We’ve said many times that obligations made to other people are great motivators. We can plan our vacation with others to obligate ourselves. Meet a friend, another couple, or a group of friends. A few caveats:

• Avoid a large group vacationing together. We don’t want to feel like there are enough people that we “won’t be missed” if we drop out.
• Don’t plan with only immediate family if a vacation would make us feel like we’re not supporting our family. This arrangement may paradoxically encourage us to cancel our time off.

Plan Ahead 

Personally, I think that most people who don’t go on vacation demonstrate a lack of planning. We can’t let our vacation departure day arrive and think we’ll make a “game-day-decision” on whether or not we have the time. We must prepare ourselves and our work for our absence. Some suggestions to consider:

• Put it on a calendar. We should block out our vacation time and show it as out of the office as soon as we schedule it. We don’t want other people to schedule meetings for us on days we’ll be gone.
• Put it on any shared office calendars. Whatever our office vacation system is, make sure to mark our vacation there too.
• Make a list of what we are working on. Try to consider anything that might need attention while we’re out. Share this list with coworkers ahead of time so they know we’re leaving and schedule time with them to answer questions if necessary before we leave. The busier we are, the further ahead of time we should start that process. Do NOT offer wishy-washy-ness about taking our time off. We’re leaving. Period.
• Start letting anyone outside our organization know we’ll be gone, if necessary. Let them know whom to contact in your absence if necessary. Here again, no wishy-washy-ness! We’re not adjusting our vacation for the convenience of others.
• Set up the out of office email. (Microsoft Outlook can schedule dates well in advance now, so we don’t need to wait until the moment we’re leaving to do it!)

It’s worth mentioning that sometimes we are blindsided by someone else’s vacation and we have exactly the opposite problems. We arrive at work on Monday and find that Shannon took this week off but never told us. Everyone is left in the dark and scrambling to address anything to do with Shannon. We hate dealing with that. But don’t let the moral of Shannon’s vacation story be that we should never leave. The moral is to plan ahead!

Let Work Go

The most important part is to let go of work and actually enjoy our vacation! This is how we’re accountable to ourselves! If we have trouble letting go, think about it this way—pretend we just got in a terrible accident and are stuck in the hospital for two weeks. We have a breathing tube in and can’t talk on the phone. That could happen. And our work would survive. And they wouldn’t fire us. As weird as it sounds, vacation is much the same. 

I’ve heard different approaches to staying digitally connected while out of the office. My personal technique is to take a hard line and not look at email while I’m on vacation. The philosophy I subscribe to is that any thoughts of work will cause stress during vacation. Others feel like it’s too stressful to not know what’s going on. They don’t want to return to work to find a full inbox. A hybrid approach I’ve tried has been to show myself out of office one more day than I actually will be out. I use that last blocked out day of vacation to catch up on emails and get ready to return to the office.

What’s Your Account?

Have you ever canceled vacation? Was it worth it? What advice do you give to others on the topic? Do you follow your own advice?