How to enjoy a guilt-free holiday

Have you ever enjoyed a peaceful, relaxing and refreshing holiday? A welcome break that has given you the opportunity to recharge, reboot and revitalise.

You feel great having been given the chance to get away from it all, spend more time with your significant other and family and catch up on all the books and podcasts you’ve been putting aside for a long time.

You come back and return to working on day 1 with the years challenges and stresses behind you and you feel ready to be productive and make real progress.

But very quickly it all changes. Especially when you realise so much momentum has been lost. It takes so much energy and time to try and regain that momentum that within a week, you feel like it’s back to square one.

Those peaceful vibes are gone, and you already feel like you need another holiday to destress from the immense workload!

For the last 5 years I have felt exactly the same, especially when I left my full-time corporate role to start a business.

Every year would be the same. I was excited to go on holiday but dreaded coming back. I’d worked so hard to build up momentum with a ton of things on my to-do list and meetings booked – the busyness made me feel safe.

This year before going on holiday, I took some time to actually think about why this same cycle was happening.

Why did it take 1 day to undo a nice weeks holiday that was meant to be the culmination of all my hard work for the past year?

The answer was in the planning.

Like many other people, I scrambled to have all of my work completed before I clocked out. Every year it felt like a race against time to clear my diary and tasks completely so that I would worry about absolutely nothing when I returned to work.

Sounds great right? Except what happens when you come back? If there was no work to come back to, then immediately, I felt straight back into panic mode. Finding tasks to do, rushing around trying to fill my diary and at the same time working reactively to respond to all the emails and calls that I missed when I was away.

I spent so much time planning how to sign out before my holiday but no time planning how to sign back in.

But this time round I tried something different.

Instead of scrambling around trying to have everything completed before I left, I made a list of all the things that were urgent and all the things that weren’t urgent and more importantly – would remain that way when I returned.

With that in mind, I got the urgent tasks completed in the week leading up to the holiday and scheduled the not urgent tasks evenly throughout my first week back to work.

This had two benefits:

1)????It allowed me to keep the momentum going when I returned in a structured manner

2)????Blocking the tasks into my diary prevented time from being taken up by unstructured or reactive tasks that would lead to stress and un-productivity

The second action I took was to change how I wrote my out-of-office email whilst I was away.

Instead of informing the recipients of my return date, I instead requested they book in urgent calls and meetings with me 1 week after my return-to-work date (with a Calendly link included for them to do so).

Again, what this created for me was space and time, meaning my return to work would allow me to be proactive with my time rather than reactive.

I’m writing this article 6 days into my return to work from my holiday and I can honestly say this has been the best I have felt post-holiday with no guilt or regret!

Planning beyond my holiday as well as before has allowed me to extend the relaxed and refreshed feeling which in turn has allowed me to more productive and not make me question why I took a holiday in the first place!

I will definitely be approaching every holiday for this in the future.

What steps do you take to ensure a guilt-free holiday?