It has been a few weeks since I wrote on my personal blog. It has been even longer writing on a non technical topic.

I just got back from a week long vacation to Las Vegas and it was a much needed break. Leading up to the vacation I was go go go. Work was running at 100% and life was running at 100%.

I could not wait for my vacation to start. I felt the slow burnout creeping in that comes from a hot start to the new year. Thankfully I have always worked at companies that fully supported taking vacation. Not the type of vacation where I would need to be near my computer if something happened. The type of vacation where you can truly log off and you knew that everything would be handled at work while you were gone.

Even with that awesome work environment, I have had times in my past where I could not let go of work even when on vacation. I would be at vacation worrying about tasks left undone and all the work that NEEDED me to be completed successfully.

Without me I thought the company would fall apart and they needed me to make sure things ran smoothly.

After coming back from those vacations I remember I would still have a stressed feeling when I came back. I wondering what was happening?! I was supposed to take a vacation and feel refreshed after. Instead I felt as stressed as the day I left.

Now this would not happen every time I took vacation, but it happened enough over the years. I think the biggest problem was very ego driven. Internally I knew that was not true—people take vacation all the time at different levels and everything is fine until they come back. But my mind tricked me and decided that if I was not there, things would go wrong and things would not get fixed. Spoiler, everything was fine when I got back. Even when there were problems that arose, my very capable co-workers solved every problem. I didn’t realize at the time that this created unnecessary risk for the team and slowed others down.

Another thing that I have done in the past is respond to things when I was on vacation. When I did that it felt heroic, I felt that I went above and beyond to come in and answer questions.

That was not heroic, that was me not being able to give up control.

That was also not a good vote of confidence on my side for my co-workers. I can only imagine how annoyed I would be if I was working on a problem and someone that was not even working comes in and tries to solve it. Now let me make a small side note here, there are always crazy circumstances that necessitate people stepping in on their day off, but most of the time that is not the case.

After a few years of having half vacations, I decided to do something about it. One of the first things I changed was that I upped my knowledge sharing. Earlier on in my career I must say I loved being the only one to know the solution, this way people would have to come to me for the answer. That was another selfish thing on my part, I have only gotten this far in my career by everyone sharing their knowledge freely with me. I needed to do the same. Over the last few years I have spent a lot of time sharing all the knowledge I know about a variety of topics. Anything from mundane tasks to documenting a complicated feature. I took time to answer questions and walk people through all my processes.

This did two things for me. It made me feel good that I was freely sharing knowledge that was shared with me, but it also brought a sense of teamwork and community when it came to my job. We talk a lot about teamwork and community in the working world and I believe there is no easier way to build that than by sharing knowledge.

Another thing to build before I fully enjoyed my vacations is trust. Not just trust that my co-workers would step up, that I always known to be true. Every time I was away and something came up, my co-workers always stepped in. The one thing I could control was the trust my team put in me. The trust that I would share all the critical elements of my job. The trust that I would not step in and fix things when I was away. And finally the trust and respect my co-workers deserved from me—that they were professionals that were fully qualified to do the job.

Now talk is cheap, so what has made my vacations more enjoyable over the years? I fully leaned into what I talked about in this article. The week leading up to the vacation I was not trying to force solutions to problems before I left. I did what I usually do and showed up and did a good job. And whatever was not completed, I made sure I communicated where I left off so someone else could complete the task when I was gone.

When I go on vacation nowadays, I log off all my work related emails and slacks and give a very small group of people my cell phone number for truly critical issues. Turns out there has been no critical issue that was not able to be solved when I was on vacation. While I was on my last vacation to celebrate some family milestones, I was able to be fully present with my family and I enjoyed every minute of it. I got back 2 days ago more refreshed than ever. I felt like I had a good reset and I am no longer feeling burned out and I am ready to get back to it…when Monday rolls around ;).

Turns out it’s a lot more fun being part of the Justice League than pretending to be Superman.