Three reasons to take a REAL vacation – and why you should not “just check in”

When was the last time you took a REAL vacation from work? By that I mean a vacation where you didn’t check work email, didn’t tell your coworkers “just call me if anything comes up,” and didn’t spend a portion of each day stressing out about what may or may not be happening with work.

For many of my friends and corporate coworkers, the answer is “Wow, I can’t even remember a vacation like that!” Some of them have listened to my soapbox speech about why they should take a real vacation, and a few have even done it!

Those who do it become true believers.

Why? Sooo many reasons – for the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on three reasons with evidence to back them up.

First, for context, I’ll share a bit about how and why this became a mission of sorts for me.

In the early 2000s I took my first true “off the grid” vacation. My husband, a friend of ours and I took a canoe trip down the Green River in Utah, which flows through Canyonlands National Park outside of Moab. It took about 4 days from when we put in at Mineral Bottom until we were picked up near the confluence where the Green River meets the Colorado River.

When you’re on the Green River, at least back then (and I think still today), there is NO cell service. And once you get about 10 miles down the river from Mineral Bottom, you don’t even have access to people via a road – it’s just you, your boat, the river and the canyon walls. You’re virtually unreachable, except by satellite phone (which we didn’t have), boat or helicopter.

During the day it was so quiet we could hear the birds’ wings flap as they went by. At night we looked up at a sky covered with stars. Occasionally an airplane flew over, reminding us of the “real world,” but otherwise there was no technology involved.

It was so relaxing and freeing to focus on the world around me, and to have no option to check email or voice mail. I really didn’t think about work, because there was literally nothing I could do about it.

Before I left, I joked with coworkers that they would need to send in a helicopter to find me if they needed something from me. No helicopters came.

And the world kept spinning. And I didn’t get fired. And nobody else took my job. And I continued to get great performance reviews.

So when I went on my honeymoon a few years later, I totally checked out again. We went to Mexico, and I couldn’t take a work phone with me per company policy. Besides, it was my honeymoon! I told my manager that if she needed to reach me that she could call my parents, and they would give her the hotel phone number.

I didn’t get a single call.

Again – I didn’t think about work while I was gone, work got done without me, and I continued to be a valued member of the team. And I started to make it a point to take a REAL vacation at least once a year.

So enough about me – here are the proven reasons to take a REAL vacation:

1. It refreshes your energy and creativity – especially if the vacation is longer than 2 weeks!

Although I have yet to take a trip that’s longer than 2 weeks (#vacationgoals), I know that 10-14 days away rejuvenates me. I come back with a new perspective on “problems” and renewed energy for tackling them.

Since my vacations almost always involve going to places I’ve never been, experiencing different cultures and ways of doing things inspires me. Just being away from the day-to-day routine activates my brain – the more scientific term is “creates new neural pathways.”

I also come back with more gratitude for my life and my work. I’ve seen farmers in Peru using horse-driven plows, and protesters in Barcelona decrying their lack of work options. I have it pretty darn good, and it’s good to be reminded.

2.     It improves your health – in fact, it reduces your risk of dying from heart disease.

There are many studies that show variations on this theme. Most of them show that the main impact is on mental health via reducing stress, which then influences physical health. So even a vacation of lying on the beach – as long as you’re not checking your work phone – helps your health!

And if you are active on your vacation, you reap even more health benefits. Walking more, trying new activities, and exploring new places challenge your muscles and your brain. Dopamine kicks in and gives you a bonus happiness boost.  

3.     It helps your teammates expand their skills and gain insight on what you do.

When you leave for a week or two – rather than just a day or two – work needs to get done in your absence. And when you take a REAL vacation, your team needs to figure out how to get it done without you.

You may be thinking “I don’t want to put that burden on my teammates – they are already so busy with their own work.” While that’s likely true, it’s also likely that you’ve picked up their work at some point, whether for vacation or due to other circumstances. I covered for coworkers on maternity leave at least 5 times – and those were usually 8+ weeks each.

And guess what? I (and others) figured out how to get the most important work done. I learned about different projects. I got to work with different people within the company and outside the company. And I was happy to reassure the new mom that her work would be handled during that important time in her life. My coworkers never expressed resentment for covering my work.

So what about the “down side” of being completely unplugged from work? Here are the top reasons I’ve heard, and my responses.

Facing the stuffed inbox and spending time “digging out” of email.

I get it – when I’d come back from a 2-week vacation, I’d usually have more than 700 new emails in my Inbox. Ugh. And yes, it took me a few hours to sort through those to figure out what needed a response and what could be deleted or archived.

I blocked the first few hours of my first day back to deal with that, and set my email message to say “thanks for your patience while I catch up.”

What I discovered was that many of the emails ended up falling into one of the following categories:

• The usual “delete immediately” category – the emails that I’d get regularly that could go immediately to the trash.
• "Issue resolved" category – emails related to an issue that was already resolved before my return, which I could either archive for reference or delete.
• "Issue being handled by a coworker" category – when people realize that you are out of the office for more than a couple of days, and that you really are NOT responding to email, they find someone else to help them. And most of the time, there was no reason for me to get involved after my return.

Yes there were some things I needed to jump on right away. I usually got to those by the afternoon of my first day back. And it all worked out just fine.

If I had spent “just an hour a day” on “cleaning out email” on vacation, I would have spent 10-14 hours over the course of 2 weeks on email, not counting the mental time afterward to get back in vacation mode. Instead I spent about 4-5 hours on my first day back.

My boss/coworkers will realize they can make do without me. I have actually found that completely unplugging has the opposite effect. My boss and coworkers gained an appreciation for all that I did, and realized they didn’t want to make do without me. In fact, my boss always said how glad she was when I came back!

I’ll be seen as a slacker or having less of a work ethic. Maybe my coworkers just wouldn’t say it to me directly, but I never heard this feedback. I worked plenty hard when I wasn’t on vacation.

For my real vacations, I often went a place where I couldn’t work either because I was in a remote place without connections, and/or I was in a foreign country so I wasn’t supposed to access work documents anyway. That definitely helped remove the “I should be working” guilt factor. But even when I could get online, I resisted temptation because I knew I’d get sucked into the work vortex.  

Have I persuaded you to give it a try? Once you do, I bet you’ll do it more!