How to unplug during a vacation in 3 steps

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Are you committed to being completely offline during your vacations? Because here’s what I can guarantee, being offline and actually giving your brain a rest from work is not going to happen unless you commit and plan for it. In today’s podcast I’m walking you through the 3 steps that are required to have a completely unplugged vacation.

Topics in this episode:

  • Why transitions are hard and the importance of compassion for yourself during them.

  • The first step to being offline for your vacation is to commit to it

  • “If it works out” is not a commitment

  • The 4 necessary plans you need in order to prepare to be offline

  • What you need to communicate to your boss and team in order to be offline

  • The importance of knowing why being unplugged is important

Show Notes:

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Transcript

Intro

With summer approaching, most of us are starting to plan our vacations. But there's one plan that is often missed when we start thinking through everything that's necessary for our vacation time, and that is a plan for how to be completely unplugged and offline. 

Because here's what I can guarantee - being offline and actually giving your brain a rest from work is not going to happen on your vacation unless you commit and plan for it. 

So today's podcast, I'm walking you through, step by step, exactly what you need to do in order to have a vacation that you're completely unplugged for. You ready? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 

Hello, working moms. How is everyone doing today? By the time you hear this podcast, I will be on summer break and the kids will be out of school. And the rhythms of life will have shifted quite dramatically as school ends and T ball ends and my daughter's play has its performances, and I wrap up ultimate frisbee for the spring season. All of it's about to end. So lots of things going on and lots of things in my life are sort of wrapping up as I think about and write this podcast. 

And just in case you need a reminder, I want you to remember that transitions are difficult for both our kids and for us. 

Transitional moments and heightened emotion.

Our brains and bodies do not like to transition. We are designed to keep going in the same direction a ball in motion stays in motion, and the energy that's required to stop that ball from moving or to change its course is a lot. And our brain doesn't like that. It just prefers to just keep things moving in the way that they are. 

Oftentimes what happens is there's a whole lot of internal chaos in our minds and our bodies and our hearts in the middle of these transitions that cause a lot of chaos. And what that means is that you need to expect a lot of emotion from your kids who are anticipating school ending and activities changing and who are anticipating going into new rhythms this summer. Even though they may be fun or they may be good rhythms, the littlest things might cause them to melt down or feel irritated. 

And the same is true for us. We're probably going to need a little bit more rest, a little bit more downtime, a little bit more space for our frustration in the midst of this transition. And I know a lot of times women don't anticipate these transitional moments and the heightened emotion that comes with them. And it could be very startling. It could sort of throw us off. And then we start thinking, why am I so frustrated so much? What's going on with me? What's wrong? And we have this whole heap of self judgment that happens. 

So I want none of that for you. I just want you to give yourself a lot of compassion during this transitional time. Expect a little bit more difficulty, a little bit more emotion from your kids, from yourself. 

No more being at the bottom of the list.

Give yourself space in order to go through this transition with a lot more ease because you are a part of a movement. A movement to say, no more being at the bottom of the list. No more not having space in my life for me. 

No more sacrificing family time for work. 

No more your family always getting the leftovers of your best self. 

No more snapping all of the time at your family. 

No more waiting around for weekends or vacations. 

No more working on your vacations. 

That is what we're going to talk about here today. There's really three steps to not working on your vacation and I'm going to walk you through each of them here today. Because as the summer hits, I know most of us have vacations coming up or are anticipating our vacations. I want you to have a plan for how you are going to handle your working brain during this time. 

Step number one to not working on your vacations is to commit to not working on your vacations. Now this might seem pretty obvious, but this is actually why most people have a really hard time shutting down and not working on the weekends, on their vacations, whenever it is that they don't really want to be working. This is why you check your email or your messages while you're on vacation. This is why people call you and you stay available to people, because you haven't actually committed to not working. 

It's more of a, well, if it kind of works out that I don't have to work, that's great. If nobody contacts me, then I will not work. But that's not really the way it works. A ball in motion stays in motion. The most natural thing for your brain to do on a vacation is to keep working and to push you to keep working because that's what you do 48 to 50 weeks out of the year. 

Make a conscious decision to commit to not working on your vacation.

So without a decision, a very conscious decision to do something different, you won't or you're really just going to leave it up to chance. Commitment is step one. It's deciding that this is a priority instead of, it would be nice if it happened. 

I want you to think about the difference between committing to working out tonight versus it would be nice if it happened. What do you do when you commit to working out? You make a plan. You decide when you're going to go work out. You decide what you need. If you're going to go right after work. Maybe you need to bring your workout clothes to work with you. You need to make arrangements for childcare. 

Versus it would be nice if it happened. What are you going to do? You probably make no plan. You may or may not even talk to your partner about watching the kids. Maybe you look at the calendar at the gym, maybe you don't to see what classes are going on. 

In what scenario are you, giving yourself the most likely chance to work out tonight? Obviously, it's the first, right? Deciding not to work on your vacation requires an intentional commitment to do so. Once you've committed, once you've decided, the natural next step is to make a plan, that's step two. How are you going to make this work? 

What does it mean to not work on vacation?

Now, there's a couple of pieces that are super essential to your plan. The first is you have to decide what being off really means, right? Essentially, what does it mean for you to not work? Does it truly mean no email, no team messaging, no one should contact you? What does it mean? Now you might ask yourself, well, shouldn't it be sort of all of those things? As your coach, at least for this moment and in this podcast, I would say yes, most of the time it should. 

Because if you decide you're going to allow yourself to check your email like once a day, likely checking email turns into answering emails and then being on your computer much longer than you want to be. If you decide, oh, I'm just going to take this one really important meeting. That one meeting turns into two or maybe turns into a couple more phone calls or messaging with clients or follow up emails and so forth. You all know what I'm talking about. 

I know, with that being said, you might decide that there is a really important deadline or a meeting that needs to take place that you want to accommodate, that you are willing to step away from your vacation to participate in. But you need to have a really compelling reason why and it's got to be good. You have to be able to convince me, your partner, or even really your kids, on why it's compelling. 

I want you to imagine telling your kids why you're going to jump on this call or why you're on your computer. I want you to look them in the eye and give them a really compelling reason why you're going to make an exception in this moment. And you have to convince them, they have to feel like it makes sense to them why you would choose to do that instead of be with them. 

That feels really hard, doesn't it? And it should feel hard because 95 plus percent of the time you should be able to be completely off. There are not, generally speaking, many exceptions to this rule. But I want to be clear that there could in fact be some exceptions. I just want you to think about them ahead of time. 

What are the parameters of your time? 

So first you have to decide what are the rules, what are the parameters of your time? And 95% of the time, it should be that you're completely off. Maybe even closer to 98. 99% of the time, it should be that you're completely off. 

Now, there may be some emergencies that you want to accommodate and break your rules. So that's different. Initially, we're talking about: do you anticipate an email or a project or a meeting that's coming up that you are agreeing ahead of time to make an exception? In this case, though, there could be some emergencies that you want to make an exception for. 

How to accommodate emergencies.

So this is the second thing you want to think about. You've decided that you're going to be 100% off. You don't have any meetings or anything anticipating coming up that you need to be a part of. So you've decided to be 100% off. But what if there's an emergency? In what situations are you going to allow yourself to log back on or for someone on your team to call you? 

I just had a conversation with one of my clients about this. And they told me that there was this one client that if they happened to put out an RFP during their vacation, they would need to log back on and work on it. And I pressed them on it and what they told me is that this client is about 40% of the entire revenue of the organization. And not winning that RFP would result in probably about a third of their staff being let go. And they told me that that would be compelling enough for them to work on their vacation or maybe even cut their vacation short and come home. 

Now there's a really low percentage that that was actually going to take place, but that was one of those emergencies that they thought of ahead of time that they said, it would be worth it to me to actually work on this, but notice how specific of an example it is. Notice how clear it is and how clear the repercussions of not being available would be. So that 's a very well thought out decision ahead of time. 

I remember another conversation I had with my client. This was actually over the holidays because I remember she was attempting to take off a week over the Christmas holiday. We had a very specific conversation about what emergencies her team was allowed to contact her with. And she really boiled it down to just a few things. She said they can contact me if the result would be someone will be fired or they were going to lose a very specific client. That, again is similar to the first scenario, even though it was like a completely different person, different situation, they said if this particular client leaves us, it would create a really big financial gap in the organization and if that was going to happen, I would like to know about it. All other emergencies she determined her team would just have to figure out on their own. 

So the second part of the plan is to allow yourself some emergency planning and determine ahead of time what those emergencies are and when your team or coworkers could essentially call you. So that's the first two things, decide ahead of time. What are the rules essentially of you being completely off? Are there any exceptions to those rules? And most of their time there should not be. Like 95, 98% of the time there should not be. And then two, what are the emergencies that you would allow yourself to break your rules should they happen? 

Making a physical plan on what to do to not work on vacation.

Next, it's time to make a plan for what you're actually going to do, like physically. Are you going to remove your email from your phone or the messaging app from your team? Are you going to remove that from your phone? Are you going to leave your computer at home? Are you going to put away messages everywhere? On your email, on your voicemail? 

You need to create a very clear plan for yourself that is thinking about your emails, your team's communication, and your phone calls. 

How to tell your team you will be unavailable.

Then the next thing you need to do in the planning process is to decide how you're going to communicate this out. Your boss needs to know, your team needs to know. Maybe your clients need to know. How are you going to let people know that you are off and that you're like off off and you're not checking email and not to expect any responses from you. 

This communication should be very clear that you're completely offline. Except for the emergencies that you've thought about ahead of time. You probably want to communicate those out to at least a few people. That would be the ones that would contact you in those emergencies. 

Now here's a very tricky part of the planning process that most people miss. Just because you have a clear plan and you communicate that plan to your clients or your team or whoever needs to know, that doesn't mean that one, they follow the plan or two, that your brain is not going to be compelled to want to keep working. 

How will you handle the urge to work?

This is the most crucial part of your plan. How are you going to handle your urge to work? Or if someone were to reach out to you in a non emergency situation. That urge to check emails or messages or whatever it may be for most high achievers is very, very strong. Because so much of your identity as a high achiever is found in your abilities to get things done and to deliver. And it's not going to turn off or change on a dime. 

So how are you going to handle that moment? What's the plan or the protocol that you need to put in place to handle those urges. What's the plan or the protocol that you're going to put in place? If you notice somebody from your team is calling you and you answer and you realize it's not one of these emergency situations, what are you going to do? 

Now, with most of my clients, because I'm teaching them tools to process through those urges and those emotions, and I'm helping them understand how do you overcome these moments and how do you move into intentional thinking? 

The biggest roadblock to you being totally off for your vacation…

We create a very specific protocol for them on what to do in these moments. Whatever it is, there could be lots of things that you can do. You just need to decide how you're going to handle this because I guarantee this is going to be the hardest part. It's going to be the biggest roadblock to you being totally off for your vacation. So all of that is step two. That's the planning process. You have a clear thought out process. 

How are you going to hold yourself accountable to your plan?

Now the third and the last step is accountability. How are you going to hold yourself accountable to your plan? How are you going to remember the protocol or the plan for handling your urges? Remember, you're 90% more likely to achieve being totally off for your vacation if you have some form of accountability, get your spouse involved or better yet, your kids. 

I had one client I remember that changed her password to all of her email and her apps so that if she ever clicked on them on her phone, her brain would be jolted with remembering that she had decided not to work and she'd probably gone on default mode. That's why she was clicking the apps and so forth. And so having to clearly think about the new password reminded her was a form of accountability because it was this wall in front of her that she had to overcome in order to follow through. 

Maybe you post sticky notes all over the place or you have reminders on your phone. How are you going to keep yourself accountable to this plan? How are you going to keep it top of mind? That's step three. 

All right, so you want to commit, that's step one. You want to create a plan of action that includes thinking through exceptions to being totally off or emergencies that might also be okay and take you away from being totally off. You want to plan for communicating to your team, and you want to plan for handling the emotional hurdles of being completely offline. 

And then step three, you need some form of accountability to both remember your plan and help you keep top of mind this commitment. 

Now, before even going through all of these steps, there's something that is very important that you think about, and that is why do you even want to be fully offline on your vacation anyway? What's the purpose? Why is it important? Because I guarantee that when you're feeling that urge to work, your brain is going to come up with a lot of really compelling reasons in that moment to keep working, why checking your email or messages is like a really good thing in that moment. It could be everything from this will just take a couple of minutes. Nobody needs me anyway, I'm so bored and I just really want to work. 

Isn't it okay to do this if I really want to do it? You have been telling your brain day after day after day, year after year after year, that being available and responsive and online is the best thing. So your brain is going to put up a little bit of a fight, and you need to come up with some very compelling reasons to want to do this. 

Be specific with your reason why.

And I encourage you to get really, really specific. Paint a picture, a vision for your brain on why you want this. It's not just that you want to be present for your kids. 

It's that you want to laugh your head off while boogie boarding the waves with your kids. 

It's that you want to be available for all the in-between conversations that happen with your partner, with your kids when you're not consumed with work and your brain. 

It's that wave of inspirational ideas that are going to come to you when you get back into your job because you've allowed your brain to really rest and it no longer feels fatigued, so it's just flooded with all of these great ideas. 

It's the energy, the excitement, the enthusiasm, the resurgence of motivation that's going to come for your job that you do actually love, that you just feel really burnt out from. And you're going to feel that wave of energy again when you get back into work because you allowed yourself to be totally off. 

It's the memory book that you're going to create for your kids of all of the amazing experiences and the little moments that you shared with them on the vacation. 

You have to find something purposeful, something compelling for your brain to latch onto so that you do the work to actually unplug working moms. 

Join the movement of working moms that are saying no to always being on so they can say yes to being available for the everyday, joy filled moments of life. 

All right, working moms, I know you can do it. Have a great week and let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson