Stress and holidays

August is a very popular month for holidays. Holidays are meant to be a time to relax and recuperate, but then there is the effort you have to put in before you go! Recent research by Office Angels have found that more than half of UK workers (53%) feel stressed, anxious or concerned about their workload the week before leaving on holiday and for 77% of people the positive effects of a vacation last a maximum of 3 days when they get back.

What can help before you go

Get as straight as you can with your work before you go away. Its worth going through the pile on your desk and seeing what you can give to someone else, what isn’t time critical and what has to be done before you go away. Then you can plan so you get these tasks completed at least 24 hours before your last day to give you time to deal with any last minute eventuality.

Communicate and share information so that when people phone up or email while you’re away colleagues can handle some of the issues.

Set up an email auto responder so people know that you will be away, when you will be back and who to contact if things are urgent.

What can help while you are away

You really need some time to unwind so don’t take your work mobile and in many cases leave the work blackberry (if you have one) at home. Our minds do need time to switch off (one reason I do adventure holidays where there’s no internet access). Of course if you’re self employed you may need to touch base with the office but do limit yourself to e.g. 90 minutes each morning.

Apparently 15% of people are so obsessed with work they confess to being glad to get back to it because they thrive on the routine and feel lost without it. If this sounds like you then put some routine into your holiday.

Whist you day dream on the beach and enjoy your time away you may begin to think of everything that is wrong with your job. Don’t do anything rash , do make sure you think things through carefully and I’ll focus on this next time.

Have a great holiday, take time to recharge and do whatever makes you feel great.

When you get back

Don’t plan too much for your first couple of days back home
Plan to finish at your normal finishing time and have a lunch break to maintain the relaxed feeling
If things get hectic take short periods of time where you can relax, breathe deeply and regain the holiday feeling

This should help you to keep the holiday feeling for at least a week. Any other ideas, why not add a comment?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under CAREER MANAGEMENT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.