How to Stop Checking In While on Vacation
For years I didn't feel comfortable traveling without my work laptop. It came on vacations and weekend trips, including plenty where I had no plans to work.
Leaving it at home felt riskier than carrying it, because if something came up, I wanted to be able to handle it.I was tethered to my laptop.
The alternative was sitting somewhere with no way to act on a problem IF it happened. This feeling got worse when I moved into leadership, because more decisions ran through me and the list of things that might come up got longer every year.
There's research that matches this. Jan Dettmers and colleagues studied 132 employees across 13 organizations, comparing days when they had to be "on call" outside work hours against days when they didn't. Being on call led to a worse mood the next morning and a different cortisol response, driven by the feeling that their time wasn't their own.
A related on-call study found the same thing on days when nobody called.That cost shows up whether or not anyone actually reaches you. I rarely opened my laptop, and it still cost me energy and stress.
Muting Slack and turning off notifications never helped me much, because the question I was carrying around had nothing to do with notifications.
I wanted to know whether something would go wrong while I was out and who would handle it if it did. Until that had an answer, no setting kept me away for long.
Write Down Who Handles What
What finally worked for me was assigning representatives before I left.
Take fifteen minutes and list the things that could move or break while you’re out:
- A deploy sitting in the pipeline
- A customer issue that’s been simmering
- A decision someone is waiting on you to make
- A contract or renewal with a date during your trip
For each item, write who should own it while you’re gone and what they should do. This has to be specific enough that someone could act on it without calling you. “The team will handle it” doesn’t add any value. “Sam owns the deploy. If it fails the smoke test, she rolls it back, and we look at it Tuesday” is actionable and direct.
This works because unfinished tasks eat away at our focus. Researchers have found that an unfinished task keeps intruding on your attention until you’ve made a concrete plan for it, and that once the plan exists, the intrusions mostly stop. You don’t have to finish the work to stop thinking about it. You have to know what happens to it.
Short absences are usually where this gets skipped. A long weekend feels too small to prepare for, so nobody does, and then it gets eaten anyway. I wrote about the fuller version of this for longer trips in treating your absence like a handoff.
Teach Your Team When & How To Reach You
That list keeps you from worrying. It doesn’t tell your team what to do when something comes up outside of that list.
Most of us won’t go fully unreachable, and realistically, we won’t be able to disconnect fully. So leave one way in, and be clear about what qualifies. “Reach out if you need me” doesn’t go far enough. It hands the judgment call to everyone else, leaving coworkers unsure where to draw the line. Some hedge and don’t contact you when they should have. Others decide everything counts, and you’re back to checking your phone every hour.
A threshold gives them something to apply on their own. Text me if the Friday deploy has to be rolled back or a Sev-1 comes in. Everything else waits until Tuesday.
William Becker and colleagues found that the expectation to monitor email after hours produced anxiety and health effects on its own, separate from how much email people actually dealt with. Vague availability carries that cost even when nothing comes in. A clear threshold takes it off the table for you and for them.
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Where can AI save you time?
My friends at Big Creek Growth put together a quick survey to spot the repetitive work you can hand off to automation.
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Then put it where people will see it:
- A Slack status that names your backup instead of only showing your dates
- A short note in the team channel with the list and the threshold
- A calendar block so nobody schedules over your first morning back
As a leader, the threshold matters more and is harder to hold. More things route to you by default, and your team is watching whether it’s real. If you say “text me for Sev-1s” and then answer every DM anyway, they learn the threshold doesn’t mean anything, and they’ll treat their own the same way.
Time off can go one of two ways. Some trips feel like a real break. Others leave you checking your phone at dinner and coming home more tired than when you left.
From the outside, those trips look the same, but in reality, one leaves you more stressed than when you left.
If you left with a documented list of who's handling what and a clear line for when someone should reach you, the questions that normally follow you around already have answers. If you didn't, you carry them with you, and no amount of muting makes them go away.