What does time off work look like for you? Does your company encourage you to take all your vacation time, support you in totally unplugging when you’re off, and maybe even offer sabbaticals? Is your company on the other end of the spectrum, rewarding employees who don’t use their vacation time or who continue to communicate when they’re off the clock? Or—and I’m guessing this is many of us—do you face mixed messages from your company, boss, and coworkers that simultaneously encourage and discourage stepping fully away from work when your work hours are over?

As a project manager, being off when you’re off can be particularly challenging if the best place for coworkers to turn for project information isn’t documents or software, but you. If they must ask you to get the updates they need, unplugging will be harder. This is especially true if your projects have tight deadlines.

You need breaks from work to do your best work. Ignoring this reality causes burnout.

I’m not going to get into the science of breaks as that isn’t my field, but I speak as someone who has personally experienced both the excellent work I can do when I’ve had enough rest and downtime, as well as the burnout that sets in when I give in to constant demands on my time and fail to defend the rest and downtime I need. I see peace and health in the eyes of coworkers who have just come back from vacation, and I see errors increase from coworkers who haven’t gotten enough sleep or are facing extra demands. I sometimes get my best ideas for solving a work problem while I’m off work, or after I’ve taken time away from the problem and return to it.

I’m assuming you can relate to some of this, and you already agree that breaks from work are valuable, but maybe you have a hard time unplugging fully enough, often enough. If taking time away from work truly leads to our best work, and being open to work messages on a near-constant basis increases our risk of burnout (leading to worse work), ideally our companies would fully support us getting the rest we need so we can give our best to them. Unfortunately, we often need to be the ones defending our own time off if we are going to recharge successfully. This sucks, but if we accept this reality and lean into the art of defending our breaks, our health, our projects, and our companies will all reap the benefits.

Amid mixed messages about time off, I've been pretty successful at defending my “off” hours so I can give my best during my “on” hours. In the rest of this post, I’ll lay out the very practical strategies I use to do this.

Prepare your coworkers that you’ll be off.

When I’m going to be off work, I do a few key things:

I check what tasks are assigned to me while I’m off, and make sure they’re accounted for. This could mean doing them early, rescheduling them until after I return, delegating them to someone else, or assessing whether they’re still needed. Not only does this avoid leaving anyone hanging, but it reduces any confusion I’ll need to clear up when I’m back.

I assess which of my projects are likely to need me while I’m off. Then I make sure I tell key stakeholders on these projects about my vacation, as well as another project manager who could support these projects in my place if needed.

I warn people about my vacation ahead of time in digital status messages. I’ve started doing this recently and it’s one of my favorite strategies. It’s been effective at eliciting needs people might have during my vacation that I wouldn’t know to ask about.

Does your company use a software that allows you to write a short status message? For my company this is our instant messaging software, so in my status area I’ll write something like “Will be off next week (Jan 1-5). What can I do this week to set your projects up for success?” The more days in a row I’ll be off, the sooner I’ll post this message. Not everyone will see it, but people who need me frequently are likely to see it and reach out. This creates a best-case scenario where someone else doesn’t need to cover this unexpected work for me, but I also don’t need to do it during my vacation.

You could put this message in an automatic email reply in the days leading up to your vacation if that’s the best option available to you, but I like doing it as a status message because it feels less intrusive to people who don’t need it. If you work in a physical office, you could easily do this by posting a sign outside your office or cubicle.

Carefully craft your out-of-office automatic email reply.

When you write your out-of-office automatic email reply for the days you’ll be gone, do you feel the temptation to give people a way to contact you on vacation? My main piece of advice is to simply resist this temptation. Tell people what their options are for solving their problem, and don’t make ‘contacting you on vacation’ one of those options.

Here is how I write my out-of-office automatic email replies for vacation time:

Thank you for your email.

I am away from work and will return Tuesday, January 2nd. If waiting until then for a response is likely to cause a project delay, please contact Person A ([email protected]) or Person B ([email protected]). Otherwise, I will respond to your message as soon as I am able after I return.

Thanks!

Megan

Note a few other things I’m doing in this message:

I’m encouraging them to think honestly about whether they need to bug another employee about this, or if it can wait for me. I don’t want my vacation to create more burden on my coworkers than it needs to.

I don’t promise I’ll respond to their message on my first day back from work. You never know what fires you’ll need to put out that first day back, and you may not have time to respond to every email that day.

Make friends with your notification settings.

A major way to ensure you don’t respond to work messages while you’re off is to make sure you aren’t notified about them. Some people rely on coworkers to not message them when they have vacation messages posted, but I think this is unfair. Other people should be able to do the work of getting a message sent to you and get it off their list. But you should be just as free to not respond until you’ve returned to work hours.

In an age where we have the technology to be notified about work messages on all our portable personal devices, we also have the technology to turn those notifications off. If you haven’t, I recommend you take 15 minutes to learn how notifications work on your devices, so you can take the initiative to turn them off and make sure you aren’t receiving them on vacation.

For example, my Apple devices have focus modes. I have one called “Work” and one called “Personal.” I have a schedule programmed that automatically puts me in Work mode during regular work hours and Personal mode outside of regular work hours. My work apps (email, instant messaging, project management software) are allowed to notify me when I’m in Work mode, and not when I’m in Personal mode. When I wake up on a vacation day, I can easily make the manual switch to Personal mode for the rest of the day, and for an extended vacation, I have a way to switch all regular work hours into Personal mode with a few taps, which I can switch back when I’ve returned to work.

Even if you don’t have these exact notification options, you do have options. If you take the time to research what they are, the quality of your time off will improve.

If you must work when you’re off, set clear boundaries around it.

As much as I believe in protecting your vacation time, I won’t pretend there aren’t exceptions. You might be running a particularly time-sensitive project. Everyone in your department might be off at the same time, and somebody needs to check in to make sure nothing has broken. I still encourage you to think hard about whether there’s any other solution to keeping things moving without you, because seriously, your time off is important.

But if not, then figure out the minimum amount of work engagement that will get the job done, and make sure the relevant people know what that will be. Some examples:

• Telling just one person they have permission to text or call you in an emergency
• Checking messages just once during your vacation at a specified time, or once a day at a specified time
• Being available for just one specified half-hour each day
• Getting online for just one video meeting

If someone asks you engage more than this during your time off, propose an alternative solution before agreeing to what they ask. Also, if this is a difficult time to fully unplug, consider whether moving your vacation to a different time when you’ll be needed less urgently would recharge you better.

Good luck on your journey to being more fully “off when you’re off.” With practice, you can get better at setting the boundaries you need to do your best, most impactful work.