Avoiding Work on Vacation

Hawaii April Travelog #24
Waikoloa - Wed, 13 Apr, 2022, 5pm

A big downside of it becoming so easy to work remotely is that boundaries between "at work" and "not at work" disappear. It used to be that when colleagues don't see you at your desk, they know you're out. Now, since they never see you at a desk (or really at all) anymore they don't have that as an indicator. And in US business culture there's a widespread desire on the part of workers to stay involved in work, whether during late nights, weekends, or entire weeks off.

Well, I am in the middle of an entire week off. How am I doing in making my time off, off?

I'm doing really well in that regard. Getting sucked back into work while I'm away has never been a weakness of mine. But even one instance of, "Oh, let me just respond to this one thing..." can turn into 30 minutes, 45, or more at a clip.

I've been checking my work email queue about once a day— from my phone. I decided to do that initially just to delete obvious spam. That had the pleasing effect of reducing the number of unread messages on the mail icon— reducing my worry about how much of a backlog I'll face next Monday morning.

Then I figured as long as I'm scanning subject lines and the first sentence or so of the email (i.e., what's shown in the preview mode) I'll see if anything indicates clear urgency, like "CW, this is on fire, please help!" So far nothing has.

Slack has been another potential source of distraction. A few coworkers have @-ed me in channels or DMs. I ignored those at first on Monday. By Tuesday they started to get annoying, so I responded to them just to say, "I'm on vacation this week, I'll get back to you on Monday." My coworkers were all 100% understanding and stopped pinging me. I didn't have to go to the extreme measure of disabling Slack on my phone.

Mostly Maskless in Hawaii

Hawaii April Travelog #25
Waikoloa - Wed, 13 Apr, 2022, 9pm

Wearing masks really isn't a thing in Hawaii. Over the past few days in Honolulu and now in Kailua-Kona and Waikoloa I've seen voluntary mask wearing in public indoors spaces such as grocery stores and hotel common areas is only about 5%. Back home  voluntary masking is still at about 90% in the grocery stores I frequent in Sunnyvale and Mountain View.

The lax attitude toward public health out here doesn't shift our plans too much. Most of the activities we're here for are outdoors anyway. We're eating few meals at restaurants, and when we do we favor sitting outside anyway. When we shop at grocery stores we wear our masks for the amount they protect us. Really masks are about protecting others from you... but sadly in the modern up-is-down, black-is-white politics of the US, the common understanding has become that masks are to protect yourself, if you're scared. 🙄

Back from Vacation, Back to Work

Today it's been back to work for us. No, we didn't just zip home from the middle of our 9 day trip to Hawaii— especially not after posting just this morning about how I kept work at arm's length while on vacation. As usual for when we travel, my blogs about the trip are backlogged. In blog time it's 5 days ago.

Rather than let everything get backlogged behind the trip I've decided to take a two-track approach and keep working down the Hawaii backlog while also posting about other things as they happen. For today the major thing that happened was getting back to work— and the rest of normal life.

Coming back to work after a week off is always challenge. The work doesn't stand still just because I'm not there. Projects I'm involved with move forward and new projects/tasks/challenges await my return. That's why I spent a few minutes a day triaging my mail and Slack messages— I didn't want to start Monday morning with tfires already burning out of control. Thankfully nothing was burning badly. As I mentioned before, this is due in part to my team respecting the meaning of vacation time. I appreciate that.

While work doesn't stand still while I'm gone, unfortunately things at home do. In particular, my poorly behaving home internet connections (both of them) are still behaving poorly. I still need to spend time chasing the providers yet again. The insurance claim for our stuff that was stolen in Hawaii didn't file itself. I spent an hour on that today and still have more legwork to do.

And the rest of my blogs about Hawaii? Well, those stand still without me, too. 😅 My goal is to catch up on them by Friday; hopefully in time to do something fun this weekend— and blog about it— without those getting backlogged, too! 🤣