The Right Way to Take Time Off

What's up everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about how to take a vacation the right way, way, because most of us do it the wrong way. Let's hop into it.

I want to start by saying that last week was absolutely wild. It was the biggest week on Founder's Journal ever. We ranked number 14 in business on Apple Podcasts. We ranked number two for entrepreneurship shows. The show is catching on fire, as I've always said, content is a long game and now 249 episodes into this thing. We are hitting our stride and the community is growing rapidly by the day. So I just want to thank all of you. I want to thank the team at Morning Brew. And this is just day one of the show. Now let's hop into taking time off the right way.

The way that I think about this is that taking time off is all about the things that you do other than actually taking the time off in order to do it the right way. You need to do a few things the right way before you actually go and take your vacation wherever you go.

External Setup

So the first thing is, how do you take time off by creating the right setup and what creating the right setup allows you to do is it creates the right mind space, such that you don't have external triggers and internal triggers competing for your time and attention. When all you're trying to do is separate from your work. This includes everything from making sure your team members are covering for you. Because the worst thing that you can do is be in a business, especially a client service business, have people reaching out to you, looking for help. And one of two things happens either you leave them high and dry and they get upset with your company or your product, or you end up saying, "Shit, I actually need to help these people." And you start working while you're on vacation.

The second is setting up your out of office message. So you don't get bugged externally. The best part of out of office messages is it is an amazing brand touch point that you have with clients, external partners, et cetera. So get creative with how you communicate with people when you're not in the office. I've seen Kyle Lacy who is a well-known CMO, do this extremely well and actually morning brew. For the longest time we had our creative folks like our copywriters write or out of office messages, so we had the essence of Morning Brew and our voice spoken to any of our partners who reach out to us when we're on vacation. That's how you take care of external.

Internal Setup

What about internal? You should be changing your slack or teams, whatever your communication app is internally change your status. So you don't get bugged internally. I've seen people do everything from oh oh two using a Palm tree emoji. But the biggest thing is, is if people in your company do not know you're taking time off, then you can't expect them not to reach out to you and try to pull back your time, let people know internally. So there is no excuse when they reach out to you asking for help when you have taken time off.

So all of these things I'm talking about from making sure your team members are covering for you to making sure you let external folks like your clients know that you're going to be out to setting up your out of office message in a creative way to changing your slacker team status. All of these things again are about getting rid of the external and internal triggers that take up your mind space and cause you to get distracted and prevent relaxation during break.

Ad Break

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PTO Company Culture

So we started by saying that taking time off is all about the setup, right? And I talked about different things you can do to set yourself up for success before even stepping foot out of the office and into your break. But taking time off is also all about the norms. Does your company truly encourage and lead with rest and rejuvenation? Or does your company literally just say, take days off, oftentimes companies will say take unlimited time, but then they don't treat your time preciously when you actually take it off, especially in startups, but really at any company. This is why it's so important for your senior leadership team to lead by example, junior people in the company, look to their bosses and their bosses, look to senior leaders to understand what is appropriate to do within your company.

And that's why for the longest time at Morning Brew, we would hold ourselves accountable as senior leadership to make sure we were taking time off. And it's also why it's so important for HR to stay on top of senior leaders. And also why it's so important for HR to push employees, to take their days at all levels. At the end of the day, most people, we are parents, we have a herd mentality. And so if the people above are leading by example and showing that we actually value rest and rejuvenation, we're going to do it. If people are not doing that at the senior levels. So there's this unspoken kind of behavior of talking about time off, but not actually ever taking it. You can expect junior people to do the same way.

And by the way, this is exactly what I saw in my first job out of college before going full-time on morning brew, I worked in financial services and there was a complete culture of hypocrisy where we were given. I believe it was two weeks off a year. I want to say 0% of analysts in their first year took off two weeks. And the reason for that is analysts work for associates and associates. Most of them were part of the two year analyst program. And when those associates were analysts, they didn't take two weeks off because their associates hadn't done that. And so there's just this culture of repetition. This tradition of basically making analysts feel bad, where they are expected to grind when they get into a prestigious job in finance. And so no analyst wants to be the one or two people that decide to take all of their days. And so creating a culture that actually respects the policy you're setting up is the biggest thing. And having senior leaders in HR hold everyone accountable is an absolute must. If you don't do that, everything breaks down from a trust perspective.

Your Purpose Portfolio

So we talked about taking time off being about the right setup, taking time off, being about the right norms. So working for a company that actually does what it says you should do, and also senior leaders in HR, making sure you're following through the third part of taking time off the right way is about understanding what it's all about. Paid time off, going out of office, taking a vacation. It isn't literally about taking time off. That's not what it's about. That's a by-product it's about giving your brain and your body the time it needs. It allows you to slow things and place focus on areas of life that we've been neglecting. I've talked about this in a past episode, the episode on how to unplug where a friend of mine, Kat Cole talked about the purpose portfolio, and the whole idea is that work fills up part of your purpose portfolio, but there are other things in your life that fill you up with fulfillment and purpose.

And oftentimes you neglect those. If you don't take time from work, there's only so many hours in a day. The other thing that I've realized is that oftentimes overworking isn't just about work. It's not just about you wanting to do a really good job in your career or you feeling self-conscious about your performance. So you put in more work. I have found through talking to dozens of people that overworking and not taking paid time off also becomes a coping mechanism for people where people want to subconsciously avoid being by themselves, being with their own thoughts and facing some of their own deeper anxieties or insecurities. And it's tough to face those things, or it's easy to avoid those things. When you have every form of work, coworkers, clients, projects competing for your attention, such that the thoughts you're left with are never your actual own things, not related to your profession.

And I'm not saying this to proselytize. I'm not saying this because you need to do better in a lot of ways. This is a reminder for me. I have historically been horrible at PTO. What would happen traditionally is I would either work on longer-term projects during vacation. Even if I was on a beach, I would work on a longer-term project for the business that I just couldn't get to during normal work hours, but it was a hundred percent work. I just justified it as a different type of work that I truly enjoyed, or what I would do is I would guiltily check slack every few hours to see if anyone needed me. And I think as I reflect on this, the biggest excuse that I had was I enjoyed this. So it's okay that I'm doing it on vacation. And when it comes down to it, it's not actually about enjoyment. It's about what is the opportunity cost of the time that you are taking by doing work on vacation? What else could you be doing that actually requires your time and energy that now you can't do because you're doing something else again, related to work.

TL;DR

And so the biggest thing I want you to be left with is one. I want you to appreciate why taking time off is so important for yourself to be filled and be happy when you wake up in the morning and happy when you go to sleep at night. And if you want to understand more deeply, why unplugging and taking time for yourself outside of work is super important. Did this episode on how to unplug from work a few weeks ago, you should absolutely take a listen to it. And on the other side of that, like I said earlier, we all have purpose portfolios. They're all things in our life that we give a shit about other than work. And as you're trying to figure that out for yourself, because these are just big lofty questions, and you want some sort of guide to help answer that.

I did an episode as well on creating a life map where it's, I think I called it getting your shit together. That was the name of the episode, but basically where you set your mission for the next quarter, year and three years. And it helps you map that out. So to bring everything together, taking time off is super important, but in order to do it effectively, you need to work at a place that actually follows through on what they say they're going to do. And you need to set up your environment in the right way. So you don't have all of these external and internal triggers competing for your attention when you are trying to separate yourself from work and do other things that fill up your energy and your purpose.

I Want to Hear From You

So with that, I want to hear from you. As I said at the top of the episode last week was the biggest week of founders journal. This is day one, and this is going to become the number one entrepreneurship podcast in the world. We have a ton of new listeners and whether you're an old listener or a new listener who this may be one of your very first episodes, I'd love for you to write in. And I'd love to chat. You send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DME on Twitter app business barista. And tell me a little bit about yourself, what you do for work, why you started listening to founders journal and any ideas for episodes that you would personally want to hear about as always, thank you so much for listening to founders journal. And if you enjoyed, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again. And I'll catch you next episode.