When he walked back into work last month after a two-week vacation at the Jersey Shore, “it was into a firestorm,” says Raymond, a Hoboken, NJ, resident who’d prefer not to use his real name. The digital-transformation project his team had been working on for almost a year had been, to use his word, “raped” by a managing director a week earlier.
“People were pointing fingers,” says the 26-year-old business analyst, who works for a Wall Street bank.
While Smith was too low in the pecking order to be held responsible for the mess, in his absence he was assigned the grunt work involved in finding out what had gone wrong.
“I would never have agreed to take that on,” he says, explaining that while he was fully expecting to have to weed through two weeks of unread e-mails, as well as get the downloads from the meetings he had missed, this new project — digging through months of Slack (office chat) conversations, to find out where things on the project went wrong — wasn’t on his radar.
“It’s time-consuming, boring, and it’s eating up all of my time,” he says. “On an hourly basis, I’d make just as much money selling hot dogs on the boardwalk. And if I had that job, at least I could surf before work.”
In part because of the fear of this kind of re-entry, slightly more than half of US workers are too afraid to even take time off in the first place. According to the study State of American Vacation 2018, which looked at 4,349 US-based employees, 52 percent left employer-paid time off on the table last year. “That’s more than 705 million unused days, forfeited,” says Katie Denis, vice president of Project: Time Off which sponsored the study.
Not only that, but another study conducted by software maker Kimble Applications found that fear of returning to too much work was one of the primary reasons why workers chose the office over spending time with their families and friends.
But, “That won’t happen if you have a [post] vacation action plan,” says Rich Deosingh, senior regional vice president at Robert Half staffing agency.
What he and other experts suggest is that you arrive at work early on your first day back from vacation so that you can go through your e-mail before everyone else gets in.
“Block off two hours on your calendar to get caught up,” says Jill Jacinto, a career advisor for millennials at CareerContessa. com. But bear in mind that if you’ve been on a long vacation you may need to allocate more time, considering that some workers get as many as 250 work-related e-mails most workdays and another 100 over the weekend.
In cases like these, Laura Vanderkam, author of “Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done” (Portfolio), suggests scrolling through e-mail in a few rounds. In the first, you delete outdated meeting invites, presentations, newsletters and such.
“Delete, delete, delete, delete,” she sings.
In the next, reply to e-mails that allow for a quick response. For the rest — and there shouldn’t be that many — you address when you can give them the attention they deserve. But don’t sweat it too much. “Being current on e-mail is overrated,” says Vanderkam.
Deosingh says that treating the person who covered for you while you were out to a cup of coffee or lunch on the day you return can pay double dividends.
“It’s a way for you to show your appreciation to them, and to have them bring you up to speed on what you missed,” he says. Nevermind that it’s also an opportunity to deepen the relationship you have with the person who is supposed to be looking out for you while you are away.
Experts also recommend scheduling — or to at least starting to think about scheduling — your next vacation as you are traveling home from the one you are on to avoid post-vacation blues. Danielle Desir, a 27-year-old grants specialist at one of the city’s large medical schools, is a champ at that.
The Bridgeport, Conn., resident goes on as many as eight vacations per year, even taking red-eye flights and showing up at her Midtown office not long after she steps off the plane so she doesn’t waste a single second of vacation time. Desir appreciates her job, mind you, since “it allows me to afford doing the things that I like,” she says.
Workplace experts agree that in most cases, taking time off doesn’t translate to slower career growth or added pressure.
“The workload will be there whether you go on vacation, or not,” Vanderkam says.
The same is true for office politics. Vanderkam says that most of us are at least a little less important to our jobs than we think we are, and that time away from work is more valuable than we think it is.
Statistics offered by Project: Time Off bear the latter conclusion out. It found that more than half of the workers who used all of their vacation reported receiving a promotion in the last two years compared with 44 percent among Americans who use some, or none.
However, not everyone likes to vacation. Laurel Touby, who sold her startup MediaBistro for $23 million and now runs Flatiron-based private-equity and venture capital firm Supernode Ventures, set up a standing desk, a treadmill and a remote keyboard at the country house she and her husband stayed in on Shelter Island.
“I couldn’t unplug,” she says, explaining that New York is highly competitive and she didn’t want to miss out on the next great investment opportunity. This while her husband relaxed, read books and rode his bicycle. This led to some disharmony. “I [eventually] had to give in and go to the beach,” she says.
However, one conclusion that you may arrive at while on vacation is that you really don’t like your job. “Most full-time jobs keep you busy enough that these kinds of ideas don’t have time to come up,” says Vanderkam.
What to do if this happens to you? Pay attention, say the experts. “While nobody loves their job 100 percent of the time, if you are grumpy about yours more than 40 percent of the time, that might be worth exploring,” she says.
But before you do anything, make sure that you are doing a great job right now, says Deosingh: “That will put you in a good position to explore alternatives.”
