Taking holidays is learning about yourself

This summer, I did what pretty much everyone in France does in August - I took a summer vacation, in my case 3 weeks during which work and posting stopped, and with only a little bit of (unavoidable but much loved) academic work involved. While we talk about burnout and how important time off - including holidays - is in the global business community, we rarely take time off fully. There is always "just one more thing"; there are feelings of urgency, inability to disconnect, and, what with the pressures of digital presence and its ever-growing "now-now-now-more-more-more" mantra, I think it's clear it will, in the near future, become even harder for us to stop work and work-related things fully, because our digital presence makes us feel that we will lose everything we try to build or have managed to build should we dare to take time off and go digital media silent for any amount of time. I even prepared extensive amounts of pre-scheduled posts for both professional Instagram posts and wrote articles for this newsletter...only to realise that a)a glitch in pre-scheduling meant that (gulp) for a while, the Instagram wasn't being posted to at all and b) that those articles detracted from what I was trying to do...experiment with taking a digital work-related vacation as well as a real-world one. So I decided to let it be.

Our digital presence is almost constant; and it bleeds into how we behave about our free time, effectively making us stay connected to work even when we have decided to take time off.

If you have read any of my earlier articles on here, you'll know I'm something of a recovering workaholic. In France, taking a long summer vacation is not in any way unusual, and I have been trying to get better at free time; and yet, despite both these factors, it remains hard for me to really relax into free time. The best way to combat this has been through exploring the surrounding area (after all, you should not live in Loiret surrounded by all that picturesque history and not explore it!), and that had been spoiled somewhat when my wifey's bike broke down (we're talking serious chain issues that thankfully happened on the way home from one of our regular evening cycling trips) and the earliest date the shop could offer to fix it was halfway through our vacation. We're keen hikers and walkers, but we're even keener cyclists, because a bicycle takes you everywhere much faster even if you cover a fair amount of ground on foot. One of our previous trips was a hilarious 40km realisation that Google maps don't always lead you to where you wanted to go, which we undertook as an afternoon trip, and which only got slightly extended by our having to stop along the way several times and try to reconstruct where we were going. Daily, unless I have a client at an odd hour or a conference that drags late, we cover between 5 to 20 km before or after supper as a little bit of pre-bedtime exercise. So you can imagine that being suddenly grounded seriously altered our plans, and made it more difficult for me not to feel antsy about not being on the road but also not doing work. The academic writing was actually a bit of a welcome middle ground.

It was, in part, all that which made me start to think about how holidays are actually a time when we learn about ourselves. Our identity, otherwise, is often very work-oriented. In a lot of ways, especially if we are active digitally as well, we are our work, and that's not really healthy. Retirement blues, poor communication with loved ones and not really knowing what to do with oneself can be connected to that - failing to properly explore other parts of our identity, the ones that have nothing or very little to do with work. When I started to realise this, I took the chance to really introspect. What could I learn about myself in this time? What could my realisations do for others? How does digital work presence influence how at ease we are with taking time off, and do we really recognise it as taking our time during the time off?

I think I pretty much answered this last one already. I believe that our work-related digital connection is far more perilous than anything we might do on our social media during time off. Because taking an Instagram or Facebook aimed picture can be about fun, and about connecting with others we may have not been able to catch up with for a while during the average day, especially if our schedules really clash and we live in different time zones, but digital work presence is always work. And the more it pushes us into keeping going, the more we forget that it is work, and the more we push our life away to "really live" during some mythical later, which we may habitually push further and further away. Our pets will grow old; our children will grow up without us; we will miss out on things we want to do with people who won't be around for ever; and, ultimately, we're not getting any younger either. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it is how fleeting life can be. And while work is undoubtedly important, and we may even dearly love it, it is really good for us to disconnect from it every once in a while, and to do so fully.

So what about the other questions I asked myself?

One interesting thing I learned was that digital fails, like the Google map fail, do not upset me any longer. I used to be a bit more concerned, and sometimes there's a good reason - like the time in Italy when we were driving with a friend, on a road to a bridge that apparently wasn't fully built. The road signs were pretty clear, and we knew it was most likely about badly updated data, but there was still something eerie about effectively driving past the end of a road and into nothingness, even if nothingness only existed on Garmin. During the 40 km cycling trip, we had nearly been lured onto a highway, but thankfully, local road signs and our own eyes prevented what would have been a pretty dire situation. Despite that, I wasn't worried - in fact, I laughed it off. I don't really know why this change...does it have to do with generally feeling mentally and physically fit or fitter than before, and therefore feeling better about facing whatever comes, or is it perhaps that for a long time now, Google maps and similar contraptions have been creating moments that were hilarious rather than worrying? Or that it happens so often? I can definitely attest to less imposter syndrome feelings and more certainty in myself in the past two years or so, which in itself likely has an effect.

Another thing I noticed about myself is that I am hungry for miles. Let's be clear - I have always been outdoorsy, and even during childhood and early teens weight gain and the same happening a few years back, I remained as active as I could in any given situation. But just when I thought that I couldn't love doing crazy things and being outdoors more, that has changed again, and left me with what I think Pratchett, somewhere in one of the Discworld novels, calls "wanting to bite the horizon" (conversely, my wife often jokingly reminds me of that quote when she wants a breather on the road and my weighted squat hardened legs think they could still keep going, but that's what our spouses are for). I think in work terms, this hunger for miles reflects in my curiosity about absolutely everything, and the inability to put books and articles down. As you can imagine, that is both good and bad - it may mean that I learn many things easily and quickly, but it also means that I often overwork. There is, also, another correlation with work - the more I cover stressful, tiring or emotional cases, the more I tend to want to bite that horizon, and hard. For all that I have been practicing yoga since my teens, nothing ever relaxes me more, emotionally, mentally and physically, than any miles spent on the bike, horseback or in trainers. I consider even gym and weights second to that. Outdoors is where I truly relax and outdoors, if I may put it poetically, cleanses my very soul.

At the same time, I like to be home. Where this used to create (inherited) feelings of guilt (there is a reason, but I will not go into that), and a conflict between wanting two things, I now manage to find ways to do both, without feeling torn. This could be many things - age, relationship status, a home I love, or some peace with myself in some way. But I now feel at ease looking forward to a trip, then deciding to stay home for any reason, and neither feeling disappointed nor no longer looking forward to it. Somehow, both feels good, and both fills me with joy, and those feelings feel equally real and I feel entitled to the entirety of them.

This brings us to what others can hopefully learn from my introspections. Firstly - we all need time and space to introspect sometimes, and taking time off and doing something else are both great ways to do so. Secondly - work and free time influence mutually. Realising things about myself outdoors can be connected to how well, or otherwise, I feel about myself at work; not just the perseverance one learns with exercise, but also other things, like taking matters in my stride, whether at work or outdoors. Thirdly - it might be of importance for us, as a global work community, to start including, into our conversations, how digital work connectivity influences our free time, mental and physical health and other aspects of our lives. The troubling thing about it is that it feels urgent, ever-present and sneaky, in that it doesn't seem like work, it seems logical, and it's "only really a few minutes a day". Needless to say, that's not true - not only can a single post quickly pull us into scrolling, or last a lot longer than we intended it to, it is also breaking our word to ourselves, for the benefits of companies that provide the platform (sorry, LinkedIn)...because engagement levels are important for them, but us keeping our word to ourselves, not to mention really know how to unplug and take time off, is breaking a bond that should never be broken. I don't think the two need to compete - but, since we place so much importance on constant activity represented in our digital presence where our careers are concerned, we should, and that especially HR and DEI, discuss what it means to accidentally build an expectation that may influence us implicitly, about how often or not someone posts and what that means...or doesn't mean, and how that may or may not influence their career.

In my days, and before me, taking a vacation was the norm. Post WW2 especially, leisure time seems to have became normative in most of the West (here, I am including Eastern Europe). Since then, medicine has proven that time off isn't just beneficial, but crucial. At the same time, though, taking time off is becoming more unthinkable, because we are digitally connected and "just one more thing" (as Columbo might put it) sounds like something trivial. But in reality, we are missing an opportunity to explore who we are outside of work...and that in itself can be hugely beneficent to our work skills, because even just knowing oneself means that we can be better at what we do, as well as how we communicate it to others.