#1 Work-life balance secret - Reciprocity

        I’ve written a lot about how important taking time off from work to enjoy family and friends and new places is to your living a well-balanced life - and to making you a better, more productive worker in the long run.

But we know from an abundance of research data that lots of people either don’t take time off, or don’t get full value from their time away because they’re worried about the important, even urgent work that’s going undone while you’re away. Just as bad, many people continue to do some work while on vacation, robbing themselves, their families and their friends of irreplaceable and invaluable time.

 There is, however, an easy, effective and cost-free solution to this near-universal problem. It’s what I call reciprocity: the idea that we have one another’s back while they/we are away on vacation. It’s the recognition that the best way to make sure that co-workers handle important or urgent work for your while you’re away is for you to do the same for them when they’re away.

For example, I recently took a few days off for a trip, but a conference call that had been scheduled for the time I was going to be away did not get deleted from my schedule. So, reluctantly, I was planning to get on the phone while I was on break and attend to that business. Thankfully, however I received a text from a colleague who also was scheduled to be on that call, saying, “enjoy this special time with your family and we will catch up when you're back."

What a relief that was! And what kindness and wisdom my colleague showed! Now, I’m not just “obligated” under an unspoken social compact to return the favor to him the next time he’s away, I WANT to do that for him. And, it reminded me that doing the same thing for other colleagues when they’re way would be a good thing, too. In fact, that’s the way a culture of reciprocity can spread throughout an office, a worksite, a department, or even an entire company. No personnel manual can establish that. It requires that people understand the deep value of time away from work, both for themselves and for their co-workers, and take they it upon themselves to extend this professional courtesy and kindness to one another.

               The late Steven Covey, author of the bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” wrote about the critical need to distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s important. Everything we do at work is important, he said, but not everything we do at work is urgent.

               To put that into practice around the idea of planning your time away from work you first need to determine which tasks at work are important and which are urgent. Then you determine which of these tasks you reasonably can get done before you go, and which ones can reasonably wait until your return. In many – more likely, most – cases there’ll still be some urgent – or even merely important - tasks that need to get done while you’re scheduled to be off. But don’t let that keep you from taking a vacation that, in the grand scheme of things, is more important – and urgent – for you and your family and, yes, for your company, too.

               So ask a teammate or two (or more) to cover those matters for you while you’re away, then trust them to do a good job. Hopefully they will know by your having covered for them while they were away that you’ll have their back next time their gone. But if this is a new set of behaviors for you and your co-workers, you should explicitly tell them that you’ll gladly handle a few urgent or important tasks for them next time they take some time off.

Establishing that culture of reciprocity in your workplace will enhance the value that each of you derive from your time off. It’ll relieve you – and your colleagues – from spending part of your vacation time working (and taking your focus off your families). And it’ll mean you won’t spend your vacation time with a nagging worry about some urgent or important work that’s not getting done back at work.

See you onboard.

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