Can You Take Time Off When You Need To?
After a successful two-week recovery from periodontal surgery this past summer, both Greg and I were elated for my return. While I wasn’t entirely out of commission–I just wasn’t supposed to speak for two weeks 😶–it forced us to rethink how we handled every aspect of our business.
We essentially had to swap roles to make it work. I switched to handling a considerable amount of work behind the scenes, while Greg took over everything client and public-facing.
Before I get into the point of why I’m sharing this, I want to give a shoutout to Greg. He’s an introvert who prefers to hang out behind the scenes, and not only did he take the lead on all of our client meetings the last two weeks, he also spoke at a conference + stuck around afterward to network. None of those are things that are easy for him to do, and he handled it like an absolute pro. 👏
Anyway, this got me thinking about how business owners handle things when they need to take time off. It’s easy to set up an autoresponder in our inboxes, but do we actually honor it?
I still answered emails while I was out for my surgery, but we take an annual beach vacation every year, and we’re trying really hard to make that vacation the one time each year that we can fully unplug and not answer emails, calls, or texts.
To make that happen, we have to “let go of the vine.” In the book Traction by Gino Wickman, this concept is presented as a way to be able to step back from our businesses and let our teams handle things while we’re away.
It’s one of the biggest obstacles most business owners face, but it’s often because we don’t have a framework to follow for letting go.
Traction breaks the process of “letting go of the vine” into five steps: simplify, delegate, predict, systemize, and structure. So what did that look like for us when we were away for our beach vacation this year?
Simplify
We set realistic expectations about what can actually get done during that time
Since Greg and I currently handle all aspects of our client work, our client projects were on pause that week
Our social media content was also on pause so that I didn’t need to check in on our engagement or DMs
We had a special edition of our weekly newsletter, “Build It As You Fly”, that week
Delegate
We delegated our client services + general inbox to our Marketing + Operations Coordinator, Hannah, who had some templates/scripts to follow to make it easier for her to respond to messages
Predict
Hannah already had documentation to guide the recurring work she’s responsible for, and we discussed any projects she was working on in advance so she could ask questions before we left
We let clients know in advance that we’ll be out of the office
We added the dates we would be unavailable to our email signatures to give anyone interacting with us over email an advanced heads up
Systemize
Greg and I set up auto-responders in our emails to let people know we would be out and to direct them to our client services + general inbox if they needed immediate assistance
Structure
We’re a remote company, and we’re set up to access pretty much anything from our phones that we would access from our computers, which enables us to easily jump in while we’re away in the off chance that something came up that required our immediate input
Letting go of the vine sounds simple enough, but it’s not always easy to put all of those things in place.
Last year when we went on our beach vacation, Hannah hadn’t joined the team yet, and Greg and I were still fielding company communications during that time. We did many of the other things–like pausing client work and social media–to minimize our workload, but we weren’t able to fully unplug like we plan to this year.
Getting to this point has been a process, and there was still no guarantee that we wouldn’t have to connect with Hannah in some capacity if something urgent came up that required our immediate input. But we’ve let go of the vine as much as we possibly can, and that’s a really good feeling.