Before signing my contract at Appwrite, I spoke with Eldad Fux, CEO, about my five-week planned trip to Canada. Once approved, I added to my calendar a month-long preparation period.
As a project manager, I’m involved in many of Appwrite’s projects in an operational manner. I co-plan our roadmap, manage Asana tasks, monitor our releases, and ensure my colleagues keep track of their deadlines.
Knowing our planned projects will not stop and not wanting them to be held back by my absence, I kicked off my CONTROL-FREAK plan.
The plan
Since we are a young company, whenever I do something for the first time and see a possibility of ever doing it again, I immediately create a template. Therefore, once my month-long planning period started, I added a template to Asana, stating our expectations of each employee on vacation. This action put me in check and helped me make sure I hold myself as accountable as I do with my colleagues.
In short:
- Create a responsibilities list
- Delegate, if needed, with the help of your manager
- Raise a flag on impossible deadlines
- Share the dates of your leave
During the preparation month, I started by adding items to my list a couple of times a week, and towards the trip itself, I spent more and more time on it. Since transparency is one of our core values, the list was shared with the entire team, not just my manager, for review, comment, or as a heads up. I made sure it included every project I’ve been working on the month before my trip in the most straightforward, thorough way possible and sent it on our a-sync Discord.
Here you can see a partial example:
This (very long) message/list was sent four days before my departure to ensure the team had enough time to review and flag problems. As tedious and long as this message is, including the endless links to Asana tasks and excel sheets, it is beneficial. Trust me.
The mistake
I wanted to be on a real vacation. No calls, no urgent email. I only kept one weekly task to myself: each Sunday morning (an Israeli work day), I monitor our KPIs, which takes me about 1–2 hours. I didn’t want to spend hours explaining how to collect the data and give access to nearly 15 accounts to someone else, and I decided this would be manageable during my trip.
Soon enough, I realized that promising to have stable WiFi on a mostly camping trip each week, on a specific day and time (with time zone differences, Saturday at 00:00, unfortunately) was highly complicated.
Gladly my partner was understanding, and we worked out ridiculously late dinners to “steal” WiFi from restaurants (or even train stations). When this was almost impossible due to weak WiFi, I resorted to taking screenshots of numbers, calculating them on my phone afterward, and adding them to my table the next day when I had WiFi again.
It is not recommended.
No fires took place
Let me kick off the final paragraph with a disclaimer, primarily for myself but for everyone who is anxious about taking a vacation off work:
I AM NOT A SURGEON. I DO NOT SAVE LIVES.
Having said that, I never planned as hard for a vacation in my professional life, and it was worth it. I trusted my preparation and knew that the lists, tasks, delegation, and videos I made explaining each responsibility were so thought out that I could step away calmly.
It is furthermore important to mention that being so confident meant nothing if I hadn’t had a team to have my back. Having colleagues and a manager who spend the time reading and watching my instructions, respect, and give me the space to breathe is not something we all have at work.
