MBA1261 Should You Work When on Vacation?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Just 10 minutes a day keeps you going all day long every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn should you work when on vacation? I know this sounds like a strange topic, but I'm going to really get real and honest here. A lot of people say that, hey, as an entrepreneur, when it's time to shut off, when it's time to go on vacation, you should shut off your business and not look back. But I know that many of us who are starting new businesses that are our first year, two, maybe in three years, that's not an easy thing to do. That's not practical and maybe even not smart. But how do you actually have a break, have a vacation where you actually get some R and R, get some downtime and you get to recharge if you are working while on vacation. Well, that's what we discuss in today's episode. I'm not one to say that shutting off completely is the only way to go on vacation. That's great and all, but that's not practical for some people. And their businesses, especially if they're going away for more than a week, maybe two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, that's a long time. And when your baby's still young, your business being totally out of touch, not an easy task. So we take the middle road and we'll talk about how to implement it in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So you've lined up some time to take a break. You might be going away for a bit and enjoying some R and R, a chance to recharge your batteries. Now, we all do this in different ways. Some people like a beach holiday, some people like going to a city like in Europe or something. But the point here is that you're not working, you're taking a break so you can come back fully charged and full of energy. But does that mean totally shutting off, not looking at messages, emails, or being in contact with your team or your business at all? Well, I actually recommend if you're going away for a week, this is totally doable and you can have your team take care of things for a week. Nothing's going to happen. And no matter where your business is, you should be able to take a week off with no problems, where you can totally shut off, not look at email or messages or anything like that. Now, beyond a week, if your business is new, that might be asking a lot. You may need to contact a manager in your business. You may need to make sure everything's okay and there's no fires. But that doesn't mean you're working the whole time. You need to manage a schedule where the vast majority of your time during those two, three weeks when you're on vacation, you are relaxing, you're enjoying yourself and you are shut off. But you need to allot some time where you feel like, okay, everything's taken care of, I'm fine. Continue having fun. Now, I figured this out the hard way, actually, through a lot of trial and error. You know, taking breaks here and there, a week, two weeks, things like that. And if you recall, back in 2017, we ran an eight week working while traveling experiment and shared it right here on the podcast. If you subscribe to the 100 MBA show, you can get those episodes. They're in our feed. So I was actually traveling for eight weeks and working at the same time. So I've tried everything and this really is what works. So if you're going to check in, if you're going to actually, you know, be spending more than a week away and you're not shutting off completely. I recommend spending no more than one hour. A really focused hour in the morning can do a lot of difference. And I like doing it even while I'm having breakfast. So I wake up, I take a shower or, you know, make my breakfast, and then I sit down with my breakfast with my laptop, and I got the timer on on my phone. One hour. And this allows me to really just knock out as much as I can in one hour. And whatever I don't finish, I continue the next day. And all I'm doing in this hour, I'm not actually doing any work or projects or working on anything major. I'm just making sure my team is totally fine. I'm checking emails. If I have to deal with any kind of urgent problems with my team or the clients, I'm checking any messages or notifications, and I'm getting back to people accordingly. If I do that, there are days where, say, for example, I'm off for three weeks and a day. I wake up and I'm having my breakfast and I'm looking at my things, I'm replying to my emails and I'm done in 15 minutes. I close my laptop, I'm done. That's it. I don't do anything else.

I don't try to find things to do.

I don't just sit on Twitter or Facebook. I close my laptop and I go for it the next day. My maximum times an hour, not the minimum. This allows you to say, hey, I took care of business, I've checked in, and you can relax the rest of the day. Of course, if there's an absolute crazy emergency, you can always give somebody in your team your phone number. They can call you. And that's what I do. I just give one of our managers our phone number. Hey, call me if there's an emergency. If not, everything's fine. If the world's not coming to an end, we're totally fine. Don't worry about it. I'll just send me a message and I'll get to it the next day if I didn't get it this morning. So there's nothing that you can't take care of in an hour. A day, one hour makes a huge difference, even less. So you can knock it out and, you know, you can start your day wherever you are in the world or wherever you're on vacation. Enjoy the rest of the day. You are on break. Recharge those batteries. I also recommend not doing this on the weekend when you're going away. The weekends Are your weekends. Relax. I've even experimented where, let's say, for example, I'm gone for two weeks, I won't check in for a day or two. Then I'll check for an hour, then I'll hold off for three days and see if, you know, everything's okay. Then I'll check in again. So I'll kind of challenge myself, see how far I can go, how long I can go without checking in. But if you are having a hard time, if you're having anxiety, give yourself that hour a day. It's not going to kill you. You'll have 23 other hours in the day to enjoy. And you're being real. You're saying, hey, I can't totally let go for that long period of time, so at least I'm giving myself something. But not everything. You don't have to work the whole day, you don't have to work five hours, you don't have to go to a co working space. No, you're on vacation here, you're on break. It's time to recharge. I also like to inform my team that I am going to be shutting off, even if it's for the two or three weeks. And you can send me a message, but I will not reply unless it's absolutely urgent. So they know that if it's not urgent, they're not going to get a reply. And if they're not sure, they might send me a message and I'll send a quick reply saying, your decision, go ahead. Meaning there's no reason for a discussion for this. I trust you. Go ahead. This minimizes the time you're going to spend in that hour where you're going to have to answer messages or answer emails or things like that. I also love doing a autoresponder vacation mode message to my business emails. This sends a message to anybody who sends you an email saying, hey, I'm away, I'm not available, I'm busy, and my response will be delayed. In fact, I'll probably respond, you know, after two weeks or so or whatever the time is. And we had an episode on that as well. Managing email while you're away. You should check that out. That's definitely something you want to do. Here's the thing. I really recommend that you shut off all your business notifications. That means no slack, no basecamp, no Trello, no any sort of company software you're using to get notifications on your phone when you're on vacation. Have those totally off. Do it when you're on the plane, on your way out, make sure that that happens. You're only spending that hour on your computer to respond to any messages, any notifications. Outside of that, you're not getting these notifications. You're not being bothered when you're not supposed to be working. You're enjoying your vacation and work is shut off so you can be able.

To focus on relaxing.

This is going to take some getting used to. The first few days, you're going to be in the habit of checking your phone and looking for notifications. Don't do that to yourself. Completely shut them off. Don't have them get pushed to your phone, and then you won't have to worry about it. What's beautiful about this one hour in the morning is that you get everything done on your computer and then the computer's left at your hotel, your Airbnb, and you're totally shut off from all that. So you're basically creating a space, a time and a medium to do the work for one hour in the morning. And that's it again. If you finish early, there's no reason you have to do it for one hour. I remember I was in Florence enjoying a wonderful evening, and I didn't have my notifications off on my phone and I was being interrupted by Slack messages and questions and developers and all this stuff, and I was like, stressing out and thinking about, should I reply, should I reply? I try to reply, then. That encourages more conversation. I can't get those answers on my phone. I'm gonna have to get on my laptop. So I cut the evening short and went back to my room. That is horrible. No, don't do that to yourself. Learn from my mistakes. Shut off the notifications from the phone, and if anything is needed from you, you'll be back in touch in an hour, you know, for an hour in the next morning. This is a great compromise for you. That way you don't feel like you're abandoned, your baby or anything that's crazy is going on, you're unaware of, and you feel secure that the business is fine and you get to enjoy your break.

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I can start my day. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit? It finally is. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.

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To wrap up today's lesson, definitely. If you're going to be away for more than a week and you have a new business and you have a hard time, you know, shutting off, of course, if you could do it, no problem. If you have a well oiled machine and a great staff and you can take off for months without checking in, awesome. But if you're new and you're still getting your feet wet and you're still kind of nervous about things and you're going away for more than a week, give yourself that one hour or less in the morning to check in, to feel calm, to feel like everything's okay, and to take care of any business that is urgent. If it's not urgent, you can always do it when you get back home after the vacation. Enjoy your time. Shut off those notifications on your phone and give yourself the allowance to have the peace of mind you need so you can relax. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit us up with an iTunes rating and review. We love reading every single review. And remember, when you leave us a review, you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Every Friday, somebody wins a lifetime membership to one of our programs where we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. This month it's worth $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but you can win it for free by just leaving us an iTunes rating and review. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for leaving us love on itunes. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I will leave you with this. I believe time is your biggest asset and your time off should be sacred. You should try your best to maximize it as possible because you don't have regrets. You want to go back home and feel like, man, I didn't rest, I didn't relax, I spent all this money, I did all these arrangements, I organized this vacation and I feel just as worn out. No, do not do that. Don't live with that kind of regret. Enjoy your break relaxing time has this time. You know, time to recharge so you can come back even stronger. Okay, I'll check you in Tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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