Reclaiming Our Time Off

In the world of my childhood, each year of school and work had gaps - one day, a long weekend, one week or two - where time sort of stopped and we all just drifted in vacation mode and togetherness. Today, even on vacation, everyone seems to be working. It's time we reclaim our time off!

A few weeks ago, my colleague Jeff Kellum posted an update on LinkedIn that resonated with a lot of people:

One sentence in particular stood out to me:

This morning I awoke in a panicked sweat and really suffering from FOMO. I’m starting to regret my decision to completely shut off for such a long period of time.

That feeling of Very Important Things happening while I'm not present, that ghost lifting my arm and moving it towards my phone at every idle moment to just quickly check that the world has not passed me by, is uncomfortably familiar. It is something I catch myself doing all the time. And I hate myself for doing it, but I can't stop.

Growing up in Norway in the 1980s and -90s, the year was interspersed with national times off. There was winter break, spring break, Easter break, summer vacation, fall break, and Christmas holiday. And by and large, all my friends and their families had time off at the same time during all or most of these. The country shifted into a lower gear, working people migrated to the mountains to strap on cross-country skis, or to the coast to swim in the ocean, and work was out of mind for a time.

Keep in mind I was a child, and this was a long time ago, so my reminiscing on times past might be a bit rosy. Nevertheless, the notion of time off being actual time off was firmly embedded in the culture.

Flash forward to today and something has shifted, in a fundamental way. Time off is more and more becoming time on either wholly or in part.

Some of this shift is due to how we carry our work around in our pockets. The advent of the smartphone meant email (and calendars, chat apps, shared documents, and everything else we need for work) was suddenly at our fingertips every time we pulled the device out of our pockets. And though most smartphones have profile features so you can set up your work profile and your life profile and choose how you want to interact with them, I know exactly zero people who have done this. The smartphone irrevocably blurred the boundary between work and non-work and habituated us to leaving part of our attention at work at all times.

Adding to the problem is lack of structured time off. While some countries and some companies schedule company-wide or regional time off to allow workers a mental and physical break, many do not. And in the US there has been a move towards giving employees DTO - "Discretionary Time Off." This looks good on paper, but often results in employees never taking time off because there's never a good time to step away.

For many of us, taking time off feels like leaving work undone, or burdening our coworkers, and the moral weight of self-determining time off, declaring to the world "I need to step away from work for a while to do other things while the rest of you keep working" is too great. So we don't. We keep working, even when it hurts us, our families, our work, and the companies we work for.

So yeah, it's time we reclaim our time off. Here's how to get started:

1. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb during off hours.
2. Don't answer work email or messages outside of work hours.
3. If you have to answer work email or messages or do other work during off hours, count it as work and dock hours off your next workday.
4. Take statutory holidays and other structured time off off. No work, even if it is to catch up on work.
5. Take vacation time if you have it. Schedule it far in advance - at least 3 months - so you can clear your plate and delegate and don't feel like you have work to do while taking time off.
6. If you have DTO, schedule time off in advance and actually take it. Otherwise you'll never go on vacation ever again.
7. Set an auto-responder on your email.
8. In the week leading up to your time off, add a footer to every email making it clear you are going to be away.
9. Consider having two phones - one for you, one for your work.
10. Have a dedicated space in your home and only do work in that dedicated space. That includes work you're doing on your phone.

Saying all this I am acutely aware not everyone has the privilege of time off. There are many people in North America and around the world who are precariously employed, work part-time, have multiple jobs, are new to their job, or have jobs where no time off is given. This is a serious humanitarian problem we collectively need to deal with, and it's a problem far too enormous to address in this article. So, if you read this and you feel I'm speaking to the privileged, I sympathize and will do what I can to ensure your workers' rights are upheld.

Your time is valuable. Make sure you reclaim your time off!

--

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Senior Staff Instructor at?LinkedIn Learning?(formerly Lynda.com) focusing on?front-end web development and the next generation of the web platform. He is passionate about diversity, inclusion, and belonging and works every day to build bridges between people to foster solidarity. Morten still doesn't know what artifact to give the museum. Design is political. Code is political. Hope is a catalyst.

--

Header photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash