Vacations — The 3 ways they can hold work value.

If you are an entrepreneur like me, you might struggle with vacations. I am the person that gets sad on Fridays because I won’t be able to experience maximum work capacity until Monday again (nerd alert). A little crazy perhaps, but I’ve always been like this. I remember when I first started working in human services I would seriously dread the weekends — I distinctly remember when we received remote working access to the server at the company I was working for and I internally cheered for joy. I could work from home on the weekends?????? YES!!!!!!!! That improved my whole life and I have been fully connected ever since. I have always loved my work that much.

Most people simply don’t understand this…#misunderstood.

I have a very happy, full life with “all the things” and I love spending time in my personal world. I also really love to work. So, I’ve been trying to define my ideal work/life integration. I don’t know if it includes any major “vacation check out” trips. I’d like “decreased access vacations” and that is really all I need.

Live the life you have imagined, right?

• I do really love to travel. My perfect world is actually one where I take lots of trips throughout the year and people don’t really notice that I am physically gone. My work is mainly intellectual at this point vs. on-site, and that can be done from pretty much anywhere. If my goal is to only be intellectually needed, then I have several work reasons to take more “vacations”:
  You come up with great ideas for work. This happens every time my husband and I leave together. Sometimes the idea lightning bolt strikes the first night we are out to dinner and then we can scheme the rest of the trip. The last trip we went on we came up with our “next big idea” on the drive home from the airport. Wrangling three children under the age of five this trip kept us pretty busy, I guess.

• You test your systems. I understand companies that mandate vacation time. I see the value in making sure that not only do people get a mental break, but also are forced to create systems. If a team member never leaves, the company never gets to see the break points of what needs to be improved. Whenever a leader leaves for a short time, the problems that arise are those that indicate what has been poorly trained or poorly executed. It’s ok — problems happen. It is better to know about them and fix them than to have never known in the first place.

• You identify break points. In my article Frustrations Move Us Forward, I talked about the pressure points that improve my business. There are the day to day issues that come up that indicate something is wrong — How do we develop a system for all of that? Then there are the indicators of what will be your next big hire…..what person do you need to field all the things that you had to deal with while you were away? When you are not physically there, the things that impacted your time away is what needs to be hired next.

During my last vacation, my “pressure point” was property management. It is the thing that dominated my vacation, surprisingly. It was good to see that HR, Finance, and Program Services were on lockdown. Even the restaurant operated without a significant “blip”. I was able to watch the day-to-day drama from afar without feeling impacted by it. Taking a vacation is also a great reminder of what is working well.

The thing that DID impact me were the property management issues…. We are in the process of purchasing a quadplex for the people with disabilities we serve. I negotiated a lease for our new corporate headquarters while on the trip. There was a leak in our Denver building that I was worried about. There might be homeless people living underneath the deck of one of our buildings-argh. We have renters moving out of one of the properties and two pending construction projects on the others. One of our contractors went MIA-double argh. Whew! I realized that “on-site” issues really require a skilled on-site manager.
So, what does this tell me? I need to hire a Property Manager, preferably a licensed contractor and can also negotiate contracts. A rare unicorn, perhaps? We will see.

Yes…. This epiphany of my next hire made the vacation worth it.

Well, that and watching my babies play in the ocean. That was pretty great too. :)

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This article was originally published on Medium on August 13th