Family and Business And Taking Time Off

There are many ways to run a business, and it depends what you want to get out of life really. We don’t want to be millionaires, who rarely see their families, we’d rather make enough to feel comfortable…and then go camping! (Artemis Russell, Junkaholique)

This week I returned from a two week holiday in France with my family. The holiday was wonderful – a very much needed break from the routine of work and the constant 24/7 style accessibility that, frighteningly, seems so normal and accepted these days. We made Hotel New York at Disneyland Paris our home for the first part of the holiday - we had breakfast with Mickey, explored the pink palace, watched the spectacular light show in the evening and notched up more queueing hours than we had accumulated in our combined lifetimes up to then – all for a photograph with the ‘real’ Rapunzel – but it was worth it An unexpected room upgrade to a top suite was a lovely surprise and four sleeps later, we headed south for a week’s stay at this lovely Dordogne cottage.

In the days before we left, I worked my socks off with support from my amazing team, to schedule two weeks worth of blog content. It left me sleep deprived, stressed and headachey in the run-up to my holiday. Eventually though, and just in the nick of time, I was able to declare victoriously, if not wearily, ‘the out of office is on!’.

For the following two weeks, my out of office worked like a trooper, pinging auto-replies to anyone who sent me an email – about 1,200 of which had accumulated in my inbox in time for my return.

After a a period where I have to admit, I wasn’t managing my inbox all too well, I’ve spent the past 18 months getting new systems in place to support better communication, and I’m now really proud how my team and I handle and respond to email. Thus, the prospect of returning to a heaving inbox really freaked me out. This is partly why, against all very well meaning Facebook recommendation, I took my Macbook on holiday with me. The intention was to steal a little time here and there to check emails and I did this only once my daughters were in bed – clearing out spam and, on occasion, forwarding items I knew could be dealt with by team members in my absence. I also ended up unexpectedly working on a couple of time-sensitive posts – so concerned I was with protecting our reputation for good customer service that I’d have rather interrupted my holiday than ask my colleague to apologise and explain I’d deal with it promptly on my return.

None of this ‘consumed’ my time away as such, but it did interrupt it and meant I was actively engaging in work whilst on holiday. As the holiday came to an end, I couldn’t help but feel I’d cheated myself out of a wonderful opportunity to truly, 100% switch off and re-engage with my family and with myself, to be in the moment, and more mindful of what opportunities my French road trip was offering, rather than what disasters I was averting through my inability to switch off.

This week I returned to work – in full ‘school holiday survival mode’. I’ve still not cleared my inbox yet – it’s been quite overwhelming. Please don’t get me wrong, because I really appreciate I got to take a holiday at all, and how lucky this makes me – genuinely I do. 2012 was spent writing my book and I barely saw my family (seriously). I’d had no experience writing a book before and the experience swallowed all of my ‘spare’ time. We holidayed that year, but I was too stressed to relax and enjoy it. I became really quite poorly through the stress of it all which had a huge impact on my personal health and family relations – which took months to recover from. 2013 was super-busy spent promoting my book and we had no family holiday at all. This year, it was the first time in a long time that I felt I had a wonderful opportunity to disengage whilst on holiday and fully relax. So why didn’t I?

Reputation is everything in business and it’s no different for bloggers; one or two negative comments on a private Facebook forum and we’re done for. We truly do work really hard to ensure that everyone we liaise with feels like they have had a great experience working with us. We set clear expectations on timings and we stick to them - so, it shouldn’t have been too difficult for me to stick to my own ‘out of office’ notification and properly switch off for 2 weeks should it?

As I’m sure anyone who runs their own business will understand, I find it really hard to switch off. Can you every truly switch off when you are self-employed? This is my business, my livelihood, and I feel deeply responsible for it. For the first time since I established Love My Dress in 2009 however, I have an expanded team of support and am really beginning to feel the benefit of this. It’s something I’ve been working on for a year at least - getting support in place that would enable me to take a step back from the 70 hour week I’d become accustomed to and adjust my work life balance to something more healthy, stress free and family focussed. It had become an absolute necessity if I am honest – my family relations were becoming strained and the notion of ‘quality time’ with them had become near none existent.

Yet knowing all of this, I still took my MacBook on holiday.

We are so hard on ourselves – as small business owners we allow ourselves to be accessible almost all of the time, mostly to the detriment of our personal health and relationships. I am sure there are many of you who are better than me and find it much easier to switch off when you need to, but equally, I’m pretty certain there are many of you just like me who struggle to stay away from the handheld devices that make it easy to check in on email and social media and all those other distractions through fear of missing out.

This week I came across an article on Twitter, via lovely Franky, my former Love My Dress colleague. It was a BBC report on how German company Daimler handle their out of office notifications. This is what their notifications say:

I am on vacation. I cannot read your email. Your email is being deleted. Please contact Hans or Monika if it’s really important, or resend the email after I’m back in the office. Danke Schoen.

This struck such a chord with me. My initial reaction was to consider it a little extreme and not practical for our working culture here in the UK, but why shouldn’t it be? The more I thought about it, the more it made complete and utter sense. It does after all provide support for urgent enquiries - and if we are honest with ourselves – can’t everything none-urgent wait a little while?

In many ways, going on holiday when you are self-employed is traumatic! The preparation for being away takes a great deal of effort, and then we face a gruelling period on our return as we attempt to overcome an inbox that is fit to burst. It can be really stressful and counter-productive. I often think it’s like you need a holiday to recover from the holiday! There has to be a better way, and I’ll wager that Daimler is pioneering it right now.

Listening to this TED talk recently, I discovered that designer Stefan Sagmeister and his entire design studio take a whole year off every seven years to ‘pursue experiments that are difficult to accomplish during the regular working year’. During this time, they are totally closed and not contactable at all, not even to their existing clients. The video gave me a fresh perspective on the value of taking time off. “As you can imagine,”, says Sagemeister, “it is a lovely and very energetic time”.

Thinking how lucky Stefan Sagmeister’s employees are, it also reminded me how critically important it is for us self-employed folk to take responsibility for factoring time off in to our schedules.

Without that time ‘away’ from the business I believe you lose perspective on life. You become involved within the business, blinkered from the outside world and opinions. Sometimes you need to unplug from work, spend time with your loved ones and actually think about why you work so hard in the first place. (source)

Taking time off is vitally important for us all – for our brains, for our health, for our relationships – and for our businesses. This article which cites this report claims that a culture of ‘all work and no play’ in the UK is damaging family life, causing high stress levels, cutting time spent with loved ones and creating an inability to switch off from work;

Given the pressures on people with increasing workloads, the demands by clients for the completion of work instantaneously and the ability to interface with people 24/7 through new technologies means it is vital people find time for their family during the weekends, family holidays and at least two to three nights a week. (source)

Big. Fat. Fail.

But seriously, it is unbelievably hard work maintaining a ‘work life balance’ when you work for yourself. Books, seminars, Google hangouts, self-made experts pushing out videos on how to achieve the perfect balance and messages of how to ‘work to live, not live to work’, and ‘work smarter, not longer’ - the positive mantras are ubiquitous, but there is such a cacophony of well meaning noise out there, that it can be difficult to know what to fine-tune in to. One of the best sources of advice I’ve discovered in a long time is the the new book by Huffington Post founder, Arianna Huffington.

‘Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Happier Life‘ is an excellent read – an honest, well researched book full of startling facts that will definitely make you think twice about staying up past midnight to work again or taking your MacBook on holiday! Arianna has been there and done it – established her own business, dedicated most of her waking life to it, suffered from lack of sleep by working stupidly long hours and fallen ill because of it. Her wake-up call was a defining moment that led to her making radical changes and rebalance her work/life commitments. It really is an inspirational read, plus, the book provides an insight in to the life of one of today’s most successful business women. If I could gift all my self-employed girlfriends with a copy, I would.

Like one of my favourite bloggers, the lovely Artemis Russell says, ‘there are many ways to run a business, and it depends what you want to get out of life really’. I don’t want my business success to be at the expense of my beautiful family – I don’t want for my daughter Eska to ever have to ever say again ‘Mummy, you are always working, can’t you come and have some fun with us – Daddy always has fun with us.’. I want memories of her childhood to be filled with happy times of us together, not of an absent mother always missing out or too tired to have fun.

There’s a collective longing to stop living in the shallows, to stop hurting our health and our relationships by striving so relentlessly after success as the world defines it – and instead, tap in to the riches, joy and amazing possibilities that our lives embody. (Arianna Huffington, Thrive)

Next year, I’m going to try following Daimler’s policy when I set my holiday out of office message. In the very least, I promise my family that I will be leaving my Macbook at home (I know my husband will be reading this – yes, you can hold me to this Philip!). I feel as long as I am setting clear expectations and that I notify those who matter – my sponsors, friends and family – then there’s no reason this shouldn’t work. We all deserve a holiday and we all have the right to feel comfortable about fully disengaging with work and re-engaging with our lives and families on a guilt and stress free basis. Who’s with me?

I’ve long been grateful for the support and advice the blog reading and self employed community is so willing to share, so I’d love to hear your thoughts; do you struggle to switch off when it’s holiday time too? What about those of you working alone with no team support – how do you cope when it comes to holiday time? How would you react to an out of office that advised you your email would be deleted? Do you take your laptop or log in to email whilst you are on holiday?

Love Annabel x

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