Three Steps to Hack Your Productivity and Enjoy Your Vacation

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With summer in full swing, working women know how daunting it is to prepare for a vacation or just a few days off. The whole point is to relax. So how do successful women leaders do it, and how can the rest of us do it too, while feeling like everything depends on you? 

As women, we take on a lot of responsibility in our lives and often forget, or simply don’t have time, to take care of ourselves. Sure, we all know, life is about the present moment. We don’t want to look back one day and regret spending most of our time off worrying about what’s going on at the office, instead of setting boundaries and enjoying the amazing things work affords us.

Some women even report putting off their honeymoon because of work responsibilities. Can you imagine? I hope not, because you deserve to celebrate life’s milestones as wholly as possible!

More than half of American’s fail to take all their vacation days, and most of them are women! Does this resonate?  

Having worked with leaders in every type of organization from small to midsize up to Fortune 500 companies, we’ve found a key element to productivity and success is utilizing vacation and downtime to refresh and reboot not just for our business but for our overall health. 

Here’s a quick, actionable guide to keeping up momentum when you’re ready to finally take that time off that you need and deserve. 
 

1. Your company’s business model
   While often trickier to navigate vacation time if you own or work for a service-based business, we’ve seen that it helps to design your offerings to accommodate time for yourself to rejuvenate from the daily routine, such as selling long-term packages and arranging sessions to occur around certain times of the month, and training others who can deliver your services and outsource during times when you’re taking time off. Regardless of the nature of your company, being able to delegate, automate and/or eliminate wherever possible helps to take the pressure off. Some productivity tools that have worked for our organization includeCalendly, a scheduling tool that helps with setting appointments that work for you,Asana for mapping out projects, setting goals and adhering to timelines while coordinating with your team. These are just a couple of examples of useful productivity tools to help increase efficiency and productivity. Here’s a link for some other tools that may work for your organization.2. Planning 
   We’ve seen that women leaders who pull this off, establish a contingency plan in case things don’t go as expected. For example, if there’s a problem with order fulfillment, they make sure there’s a point person to handle it at any time when you’re away. It might sound scary to give someone that responsibility while you’re gone, but it’s a great test and a job well done will confirm you have the right people working for you. The same goes for any department of a company—for example, if you work in marketing, make sure you have someone keeping track of analytics and anything else you would normally be monitoring daily. 

   3. Content batching
   These days, content is everything, and it feels like you need to be constantly producing to keep up. Some people don’t make their income off a particular product or service, but instead, generate income from content creation. 

   Whether it’s your main source of income or just part of your work, consider content batching. Once you know what content you want to push out while you’re away, set aside a few hours to create a week’s worth of content in advance. You can even include outfit changes to create the illusion of a new day! If you come up with something while you’re away you don’t need to restrain yourself, but you also don’t have to feel obligated to be producing anything.

   At the end of the day, we know self-care is the most important thing, but the trick is to actually do it.

“I’ve learned that sometimes we need to slow down to speed up, busy and faster doesn’t always lead to bigger and better.”  – Robin Sharma

By Christine M. Roberts, MBA
CEO & Founder, Create Your Best Life (CYBL) 
Christine is a Success Coach who partners with ambitious women to do less, be more, and create your best life using her signature GROW method. With neuroscience-based practices, Christine guides high-achieving women to get unstuck and unlock their potential in all areas of their lives through coaching programs and speaking opportunities. Her corporate experiences at Disney, The John Maxwell Company, and balancing motherhood, have inspired her personal growth and leadership. www.ChristineMRoberts.com
 

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