Why I work through the holiday period

I have worked through the holiday period since I can remember. For the last week, my entire team was on vacation and yet I was still tapping away through the days at my keyboard.

To some it might look like the actions of a workaholic but to me, it’s my favorite time of year. Here’s why I don’t take vacation through Christmas and New Year.

I take my vacation!

In the US, we don’t get that much vacation time, and I think it’s important to switch off and get some perspective. So I try to always take my vacation days before the end of the year. I try to

There’s work to be done

There’s always work to be done over the holiday period. This year, there were deals to close, invoices to get out, but there wasn’t so much to keep the team at work and I was happy to let them take the time off and let me pitch in on their behalf.

This is especially worthwhile because much of my team didn’t take enough vacation this year so they took 2–3 weeks off at the end of the year to make up. It will allow them to recharge their batteries.

I won’t come back to a mountain

My inbox has precisely zero unread emails. There’s not many times of year I can say this and the volume of inbound email has been beautifully low for a few days and I will start the year fully caught up, which is a beautiful thing.

There’s time for low-priority stuff

There’s always more work than can fit in the rest of the year round and I have to prioritize. Customer stuff always comes first. But when it gets quiet enough, I have time to do a bunch of things.

For example I have gone through my emails and redone all my Outlook rules so there will be less junk in my Inbox every day. Over 50% of what I receive is ham (like spam, but kinda wanted) and that stuff will now automatically file itself.

These low-priority items are the gifts that keep giving through the year, but I wouldn’t find time to do them any other time.

I focus on analytics

There’s time to look at all kinds of interesting analytics. For example, I discovered that one of my team is responsible for over 10% of my inbound email!

I also took the time to setup new scheduled reports for the team in our reporting system. One of my focuses for next year is to better empower the team and making sure they get analytic reports on sales and revenue will help immensely.

Internal Projects

The reason why I started working through the holiday period is because I used to work in internal IT and it is a great time to upgrade systems and otherwise cause disruption that would be unacceptable at other times.

Whilst I don’t do that role any more, I did spend time on HR tech like getting our internal SuccessFactors roll-out off the ground so we will have a platform to increase employee engagement.

Making my tech work for me

I’ve installed a bunch of new apps on my iPhone, learnt all about Medium, setup my iPhone so a triple-click on the home button makes it dim enough so my partner won’t wake when I’m writing a Medium post at 5am.

I’ve setup MapMyFitness and Periscope — all small things that I will enjoy for months to come and which will help me in my home and work life.

Reflecting on the year that passed

I find it enormously important to spend time reflecting on the year that passed. How did it look compare to how I wanted it to look? Did I meet my hopes and dreams?

Getting closure on the year is very important to me and it takes days of thought to achieve that.

Planning the year ahead

On the first week of the year we will have our global off-site at work, where we will plan our strategy for the year ahead. I’ll be well prepared for this, and have been thinking about it for days.

In addition I’ve set some personal goals (and will be sharing them in coming weeks) and have tentatively planned out our vacations for 2016. I find it helpful to do that early on, and work can be planned around it.

I’ve also got my first 3 weeks of travel planned and booked in, so my schedule is predictable over the coming weeks. Yay!

Final Words

In case you were wondering, I definitely did take time off, including the public holidays! It’s also a pretty relaxed schedule compare to my usual week. And I found myself only working around 8 hours combined on December 23/24 so I booked the 24th as vacation; it’s only fair.

It’s not for everyone, but I love working through the holiday period. It’s one of my favorite times of year and I really find it sets me up for the year ahead.

Happy New Year!