Career Strategies: How To Really Leave Work At Work Over The Holidays

It's the holidays – a time of year when many of you will go on vacation. But just because you physically leave the building doesn't mean you mentally leave work at work. Yet mentally letting go is a critical part of taking time off. Your vacation will be leave you more rejuvenated and prepared to come back to work at your best if you use some of my simple strategies for leaving work at work.

First, you’ll need to give yourself permission to 100% let go, so let me convince you of why it's so important. Yes, as a career coach I think that All-Star performance at work is important – but your family always comes first. Always. You're simply going to miss out on too much of the good times if you're distracted by work you've brought home. And that includes mentally bringing work home: distracted thoughts about work will keep you from being mentally present with your family.

On the other hand, top performance at work requires that you decompress and enjoy your downtime at home. Stress dramatically interferes with your ability to think and perform effectively at work, so taking regular time off as a means of stress reduction is essential to performing at the top of your game.

In fact, one of the best pieces of advice I got early in my career is to take time off every three months, whether or not it seems necessary at the time: vacations are a preventative measure for keeping us from burning out. Too many of us schedule our vacations after we are already completely fried.

Okay, so now that you're on board with the idea of leaving work at work, how do you do it?

Here are 6 strategies to help you leave work at work:

1. A few weeks before you leave, ask a colleague to cover for any work that absolutely must be attended to while you're gone. If you don't plan ahead for urgent work during your absence, it will hang over you throughout your vacation. Plus, it's just the professional thing to do to. So, ideally you’d get that lined up ahead of time.

A special note for people who have on-call positions: in the long run you might consider training some of your direct reports to handle the pager, not only for vacations but also to give you regular time off. On-call positions can be especially taxing when you never get a break, so getting alternate coverage will be essential to your mental clarity.

2. Prepare the colleague who's covering for you with clear instructions. I'm not just talking about written instructions: you should discuss the plan together before you leave. Start a week or two ahead of time, taking notes of what you do and creating a list of tasks for your colleague. You may need to coach her on any tasks she might not be familiar with, so make time to do that. And don't forget to connect your colleague to the people to call if something goes wrong. You don't want to get panicked calls on your vacation, so make sure your colleague knows who to contact for help.

3. Cut yourself off from email. It goes without saying that you should set an auto responder explaining the dates that you are gone and who to contact should they need to. But that may not be enough – because you'll still be able to check your email if you want to.

Ideally, you'd leave your work laptop and smart phone at the office. But some companies allow personal use on company devices, so some employees don't have separate home computers or cell phones.  If that's the case, see if you can change your settings so that emails do not automatically download (i.e. you have to actively go retrieve them). Shut off email alerts. Or perhaps even sign out entirely.

4. Leave all of your work materials in your office. Yes, it's tempting to think you'll just do those last two hours of work first thing on your vacation, and then you will forget about it. But I'd be willing to bet you won't do it on that first day and it will hang over you throughout the whole vacation – and you still probably won't do it. Unless this is some kind of urgent, urgent, urgent matter, leave your work physically at work.

5. Create a self-coaching plan for leaving work at work. Think about scenarios that will trigger you to check your voicemail or email, etc. Brainstorm strategies for how you'll handle these triggers. Create a reminder system or action plan that works for you. Examples could be a sticky note on your computer, or a dedicated notepad to jot down work thoughts so you can get them out of your head, or asking your spouse for reminders, etc.

6. Remind yourself that everything will be okay. You can trust your colleague to have common sense. You can trust your team to do the right thing. Learning to let go is simply part of the professional development process, so lean into the challenge and know that it's really okay for you to be 100% on vacation.

What do you think? What do you do to mentally let go of work?

Marie Wetmore
Career, Performance, and Management Coach for Women
www.lionssharecoaching.com   
coachme@lionssharecoaching.com