15 Jun 2022 · 13 min
Alex Lieberman breaks down how to actually take time off: set up coverage and out-of-office messages, build a company culture where leaders model rest instead of just permitting it, and understand that unplugging lets your brain recharge instead of using work as a coping mechanism.
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What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founders 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. I want to share a little update with you all. For the next little while, we're going to be republishing classic episodes of Founders Journal. Why? Well, first of all, I think these are really good episodes and there are a lot of new people who haven't heard them before. And second, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how to evolve Founders Journal so that we can make the show as good as humanly possible for the next generation of builders and entrepreneurs. We are almost at what that evolved version looks like. We just need a little bit more time, and I would love your help as we dream up the future of this show. So once you've listened to this episode, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and tell me what you'd like to see from me, knowing that this is a show by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. That's the update. Now time for the episode. In today's classic episode, originally published on August 30th, 2021. I break down the steps you should take to properly set yourself up at work before taking time off. Let's hop into it. I want to start by saying that last week was absolutely wild. It was the biggest week on Founders Journal ever. We ranked number 14 in business, uh, on Apple Podcasts. We ranked Number 2 for entrepreneurship shows. This 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 1 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. 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 touchpoint that you have with clients, external partners, etc. So get creative with how you communicate with people when you're not in the office. I've seen Kyle Lacey, who is a well-known CMO, do this extremely well. And actually at Morning Brew, for the longest time, we had our creative folks, like our copywriters, write our 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. 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 OOO to 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 Slack or 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. So speaking of taking breaks, let's pause there for a minute. When we come back, I'll talk more about working at a company that respects time off and why time off is so important for you personally. 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 a company look to their bosses and their bosses look to senior leaders to understand what is appropriate to do within your company. 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 parrots. We have a herd mentality. And so if the people above us 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 2 weeks off a year. I wanna say 0% of analysts in their first year took off 2 weeks. And the reason for that is analysts work for associates and associates, most of them were part of the 2-year analyst program. And when those associates were analysts, they didn't take 2 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're expected to grind when they get into a prestigious job in finance. And so no analyst wants to be the one or 2 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 and HR hold everyone accountable is an absolute must. If you don't do that, everything breaks down from a trust perspective. 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 byproduct. 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 100% 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 what it comes down to is 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. 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, there we have— 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. Yeah. But basically where you set your mission for the next quarter, year, and 3 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're trying to separate yourself from work and do other things that fill up your energy and your purpose. So with that, I wanna hear from you. As I said at the top of the episode, last week was the biggest week of Founders Journal. This is day 1, and this is going to become the number 1 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 with you. Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista 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.
