Vacation

Every year at Co-Creating Inclusion, we take the month of August as a break from external meetings and facilitation in order to prioritize our own strategic planning, professional development and self-care. We do the same for the last week of every month (February, April, June, October and December). We also try to hold Wednesdays and Fridays from 9am-2pm EDT as “slack and meeting free time” although we do make exceptions when needed.

We hold firm on what we have come to call “retreat weeks” and “retreat month.” The idea is that we are, well, on retreat. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re not working, although sometimes we’re not. But it builds in, in other words operationalizes, pauses and some attempt at spaciousness for what is equally important in or work but harder to prioritize - reflection and processing.

A schedule that builds in unscheduled time like this might seem unfathomable to many. I know it would have been unfathomable to consider when I was working as an architect.

However, what is even more not just unfathomable but impossible and unsustainable is to try and do this work without it. I strongly believe that building in this time has helped us better serve our clients. I also know that work that comes at the expense of us as women of color is not really DEI work.

It’s a work in progress for sure and one of the things that has been challenging has been taking actual vacation. Speaking only for myself, but being a remote team, and especially since the pandemic when everyone has become used to and willing to work with us remotely even if they have returned to the office, it’s been easy to just take work with me.

Last year, during my final day of vacation when I was finally able to actually take a break from work, I realized, this is not okay. I hadn’t had a true vacation since the pandemic started. I swore this year it would be different.

And it has been, to some extent. At least on the work side, we have better managed client deliverables so we don’t spend the entire month of August on them. At the beginning of July, when I took a week off, I very intentionally worked hard to wrap up all my projects and leave myself “bread crumb” notes to find my way back to things when I came back… and then I got sick on the first day of vacation and although I didn’t work the entire week we were away, I wasn’t really able to enjoy our vacation by the lake either. Argghhh!

This weekend, though, we took an impromptu long weekend out at the beach and it was AMAZING. I love the beach. I got married by the beach. Our honeymoon was on the beach. But we’ve done lake vacations the past couple of years and I’d forgotten how being by the ocean is like a full body massage for the nervous system.

I got more relaxation in these past two days than I did during the entire week of my actual vacation!

Something we often hear from our client organizations is that it is challenging for staff to take PTO. “Encouraging” staff to take PTO often isn’t enough to counteract feelings of guilt for taking time off and creating more of a workload for colleagues. In addition, taking time off can feel like it only creates additional work and stress before going away… and upon coming back.

If individual staff are left to try and address these challenges by themselves, it often doesn’t feel “worth it” to try and do so. At CCI, we’ve been guilty of falling into the same trap.

One of our clients just had a “wellness week” for the first time where they closed the office for the entire week. I’ll be interested to hear how that went but what I like about this approach is that the organization as a whole can take on the responsibility of managing workloads and deadlines to allow for this to happen, and there is no guilt for colleagues who are left to cover for those who are off.

I'm hoping to implement something like that for our team in the coming year. I’m also encouraging our staff to schedule at least three weeks off for the coming year - because then we can help to plan the cadence of our work accordingly.

What is your organization doing to make it easier for staff to take vacation time?

Banner photo by Alethea Fitzpatrick from her actual vacation!

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