Written by Georgia Hill, Digital Product Manager at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?
WE ALL KNOW TAKING TIME OFF IS IMPORTANT. IN ELITE SPORT, RECOVERY TIME IS AS IMPORTANT AN INGREDIENT TO PERFORMANCE AS TIME SPENT TRAINING.
Our Co-Founder Ben Hunt-Davis and the crew en route to their Gold Medal knew that their habits on and off the water impacted their performance when it mattered. They knew that by investing in rest meant they could make the boat go faster. Perhaps the most striking example is this story from Ben about the Olympic opening ceremony:
Always choosing to be switched on doesn’t usually maximise performance. It can be a combination of a number of factors in and outside of work that shift the dial. Rest and recovery are core contributors to our productivity and success. Equally, other ingredients such as healthy eating, taking time out, exercise and sleep (as our Senior Consultant and sleep expert Steve Ingham described on a recent webinar here) can all actively impact your performance in work. What’s your recipe of performance ingredients in and out of work that will enable you to be most productive?
How you take holiday is a particularly important factor in enabling how we show up at work, as well as improving our general well-being.
Credit: @Lizandmollie
For many of us though, although the idea of time off is very appealing, the increased pressure pre and post-holiday is less so. This topic came up in one of our recent ‘Team Rules’ meetings at Will It. (For more on what Team Rules are, check out this article by Laura Birch). We were discussing making sure we get a healthy work/life balance and holiday came up. A couple of people said that they couldn’t wait for their time off but were really anxious about getting stuff done in the run up and how their inbox would look when they came back. So, we sat down and thought about how to do this in a less stressful way. Here are our top tips, combined with some from this excellent article from Tristan Gribbin in the Harvard Business Review. We had this chat about a month before I went on holiday, so I decided to test out these tips and can confirm that they made a huge difference!
Before you go
Think about it early
I normally start preparing for my holiday about a week out – turns out this is way too late in most cases, especially for longer holidays. Our Business Excellence Lead, Alice Wilton, says that she normally starts prepping a few weeks out by capturing anything relevant in a document when it comes to mind. Closer to her departure she goes through it and turns it into a fully formed handover document.
Tristan Gribbin also recommends this approach:
“Don’t wait until the week of your vacation to do this. If you are taking a week off, start at least two weeks earlier. If you’re taking two weeks off, start prioritizing a month before you go.”
This approach really helped me this year. I started planning a month out which meant that I was much more organised ahead of time than I normally am. Specifically, I was able to think what could wait until I returned, and what needed to be handed over to someone else while I was away.
Be strategic about the week prior to holiday
Make sure you factor in enough time to wrap up all the things you need to. Our Managing Director, Chris Martin, recommends keeping the last 48 hours pre-holiday as clear as possible to a) ensure you have time to wrap things up and b) avoid last minute requests coming in that either have to be squeezed in or handed over to somebody else with a tight deadline.
Get the word out
Make sure that both your team and your clients are aware that you have holiday coming up. A really simple thing to do is to include your holiday dates in your email signature:
Handover & Helping Others
A big part of de-stressing your holiday is knowing that your work/projects/clients are going to be in safe hands while you’re away. Once you’ve established (nice and early) what’s likely to come up while you’re away, you can think about who is best placed to pick it up in your absence and make sure you capture all the information that they might need to know. As our Head of Client Services, Leanne Hayes advises:
“Start your handover notes early, about one week before. It gets you in the headspace of what needs to be done in each area.”
Offering to help others with this is a great tip too. This is from Alice:
“If I think I can be of help to someone when they’re on holiday I try to ask them if there is anything they can handover to me or that I can look after. They might not think to ask me otherwise, so asking them gives them another person to lean on.”
Proactively offering help can make a big difference to a colleague preparing to go on holiday. Have a quick think, is there anyone you could help out?
Out Of Office
A well thought through out of office message can go a long way to keeping plates spinning in your absence. If your handover was to multiple people, think about who needs to receive what and include that in your OOO. E.g. “If your message concerns X, please contact Leanne.” “If your message concerns Y, please Laura.” I saw a brilliant example of this recently from Kirsty Walton, our Head of Making It Happen and Operational Lead. She split her role up clearly and had one version for internal guidance and one for external and stated the relevant actions for each one. Below are a few examples from each to give you a steer:
“I’m currently out of office on annual leave until next Monday the 22nd of August. Please see below my guidance for who to contact with your enquiry in my absence:
New Enquiry about our services – Please forward your enquiry on to Farheen@willitmaketheboatgofaster.com
If you are an existing client – Please get in touch with Leanne@willitmaketheboatgofaster.com who will be happy to assist with your enquiry
Book orders – please contact Alice at alice@willitmaketheboatgofaster.com
Book publishers – please contact Alice at alice@willitmaketheboatgofaster.com
Invoices/Expenses – I will process these when I’m back to include them all in the next pay-run
Printing – If anyone needs anything professionally printed see notes from my email on 7th
Office Phone – if the office is due to be empty on any day, please set the divert to someone’s mobile the night before. I emailed everyone on how to do this in March, and you can find info on dropbox – internal – admin – phones.”
Ben and the crew en route to their Gold Medal knew that their habits on and off the water impacted their performance when it mattered. They knew that by investing in rest meant they could make the boat go faster.
During your holiday
Make sure that you unplug properly. You’re not going to be able to rest and recover if you’ve got one eye on your phone/emails. In my case, I removed Slack and Outlook from my phone (so thoroughly it turns out, that I now can’t reinstall them 
). This really helped me to disconnect. Another more slightly extreme example is an old friend leaves his phone behind when he goes on holiday to remove all temptation! This is a little extreme for most, and he’s lucky that his wife takes her phone to enable all-important restaurant googling. But whatever works for you!
After you get back
Be strategic about your first days back.
This could easily have gone in the ‘Before’ section, as you’ll need to plan this before you go away. However, the main point is that it’s important to give yourself space to ease back into things. A couple of our team recommended blocking out your first morning back to read through and catch up on emails and get your head back in the game. As Alex Kyriacou, one of our Client Services Manager suggests,
“Blocking out time for your first morning back is super useful. It removes the dread of facing a full inbox because you know you have time to work through it.”
Similarly, try to avoid big, potentially stressful meetings for the first couple of days. Doing so will require you to drag your brain back into gear much more quickly, and the resulting grinding of gears won’t be pretty!
So there you have it! A (by no means exhaustive) list of top tips to remove the stress from taking holidays. Pick and chose what works for you. I tried most of these and the overall impact was very positive – I didn’t feel stressed before my holiday or when I got back. If I had to just pick one, it would be “think about it early” as that was the real game-changer for me! Importantly, thinking ahead of time allowed me the true R&R time (like Ben and the crew with the Opening Ceremony, off the water) to come back and make the boat go faster when I got back (on the water, when it mattered).
Planning for my holiday ahead of time allowed me the true R&R time (like Ben and the crew with the Opening Ceremony, off the water) to come back and make the boat go faster when I got back (on the water when it mattered).
