What really happens when you take a vacation
We all hear and read stories about how vacations are good for our mental and physical health, leading to better focus and productivity when you get back to work.
It’s true - vacation, a change in routine and scenery for an extended period of time (more than a weekend) - allows us to use different parts of our brain and body. Time off work helps us reset. It allows us to shake up our routine and be in control of our days in new ways. It ideally reconnects us to our families, our hobbies, and the world we live in.
In case you need to hear it from another source, here you go: DO IT. Take time off, and take a week or more. Before you go, set yourself up for success: inform your teams of your offline-ness, set expectations of what they need to do. No matter how important you are at work, you are not letting anyone down by taking a break. You are not valiant for working incessantly and obsessively.
I recently got back from a vacation and a profound thing happened towards the end of the week: I moved from decision-making to sense-making. You see, my workdays typically consist of making thousands of discrete, disparate, day-to-day decisions. They are mostly reactions, incremental decisions, choices between “a” or “b”, and responding to the never-ending stream of interruptions and “hey, got a sec? quick question for you”’s .
“I recently got back from a vacation and a profound thing happened towards the end of the week: I moved from decision-making to sense-making.”
I call this the “whack-a-mole” work day - reminiscent of those arcade games in which you try to (literally) whack the moles that pop up out of the holes at random. The goal, of course, being to get all the moles back in the ground, no longer disturbing you. Sound familiar? It’s problem-solving at it’s most basic level - there is a barrier/issue, get said barrier/issue off my plate as soon as possible.
This workday structure of hundreds, thousands of decisions in a interruptive (disruptive?) stream does not allow us the opportunity to go through a deeper thought process. The whack-a-mole doesn’t allow us to reflect upon why we’re even solving these little problems and how we can better operate and manage our days. The moles just keep on coming, not giving us a chance to make sense of them.
Another way to think about it is like having a salad bar menu in front of you. Think about the thousands of options you could have on a salad. The 5 types of greens, the 20+ types of veggies. The dozens of meats, cheeses, nuts, seeds. The gluten free, nut free, dairy free options. The bacon bits, the croutons, the beans, the avocado (+$2!). Then finally you get to the 40 types of salad dressings, each with a low fat version too. This endless menu of small discrete decisions is exhausting.
When do we get a chance to really think… hey, you know what? Why am I choosing this salad? I don’t even want a salad today. I want tacos, dangit! That is of course a trivial example of how we are stuck making decisions based on the best options in front of us, but never getting the opportunity to really think deeply about what we’re REALLY working towards… what we REALLY want and need to do with our valuable time.
Being stuck in decision-making mode doesn’t allow us to enter into sense-making mode. Sense-making is, according to Gary Klein and Brian Moon in 2006, "an active two-way process of fitting data into a frame, and fitting a frame around the data. Neither data nor frame comes first; data evoke frames and frames select and connect data.”
“It includes exploring opportunities and ideating; getting out of the decision-making autopilot. Sense making is making sense of what we’re doing both top-down (frame first) and bottom up (data first). ”
So if the data points are “the hundreds of salad bar options" and the frame is “I am hungry and need lunch”, we need to think of both what we want in the salad but ALSO - do we even want a salad? What are the other lunch options we could pursue? How are we making sense of this lunchtime hunger we have?
Of course in business and work terms, sense-making translates into being able to get a full picture of how we may achieve our business objectives. It means making sense of a larger set of options that are clearly articulated. It includes researching, weighing, and comparing those options. It includes exploring opportunities and ideating; getting out of the decision-making autopilot. Sense making is, making sense of what we’re doing both top-down (frame first) and bottom up (data first).
“Being stuck in decision-making mode doesn’t allow us to enter into sense-making mode. ”
So here I was on vacation, sitting out in the sun by the pool, unintentionally thinking at random about work, my team’s work objectives, my company’s objectives, the larger market forces, my career. (I admit, my mind veered into wondering whether SPF sunblock is actually a big marketing ploy or actually a real thing).
The time away from my day to day decision onslaught gave my the opportunity to make sense of my work world in new ways that, honestly, were not even intentional. This time away from the daily work routine gave me the capacity to construe things at a higher-level, or sense-making (shoutout to Katherine Milkman’s Construal-Level-Theory from 2008). I thought of the frame, the data, and flipped them around and thought of them backwards and frontwards.
I returned to work after the week off feeling truly rested. I was energized going back to work, knowing my brain had organized and made sense of things in a new way. Of course, the whack-a-mole won’t ever stop, that is typical of working in a huge global corporation that is decentralized and in high-growth mode. BUT, my brain was back on straight, and I had a refreshed perspective on my objectives, my priorities, and my career.
For what it’s worth, those whack-a-mole arcade games are specifically designed to be unwinnable. Go figure!
References:
Klein, G., Moon, B. and Hoffman, R.F. (2006b). Making sense of sensemaking II: a macrocognitive model. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(5), 88–92.
Milkman, Katherine L, Todd Rogers and Max H Bazerman. (2008). Harnessing Our Inner Angels and Demons: What We Have Learned about Want/Should Conflicts and How That Knowledge Can Help Us Reduce Short-Sighted Decision Making. In Perspectives on Social Science Vol 3, No 4 pp 324-338. Sage Publications, Inc., on behalf of Association for Psychological Science.
Airplane Photo Credit: Tim Gouw for Unsplash.com
