If we all took the summer off none of us would get behind on work

I love summertime. I love the sun and the water and everything about summertime. The only thing that is hard about summer is that for every week you take off and every trip you go on you have to carry the stress of coming back home and facing all the work that has piled up while you were gone…so when I returned home last Saturday night after taking a week off to go to Cabo San Lucas and I had to face the pile of mail and the hundreds of unread emails and the phone messages I was struck with the most brilliant idea ever: If we all took the summer off none of us would get behind on work! I know…GENIUS idea… if I do say so myself…and I do, say so myself… 🙂

When I sold my company a few years back I decided that from that point on I was going to take every summer off and not work so I could spend every summer going forward just playing with my family. I suppose that was so important to me because during all the years when I was running companies it had been nearly impossible to ever take time off, so I vowed to change that once I finally could. But taking that time off each summer led to another big problem: While you are off everyone else keeps going! And that means your incoming to do’s don’t slow down one bit when your gone, which means that when you get back you end up being forced to make up all that work you took off by having to overwork every time you come back…grrrr…there has to be a better way…

Which brings me back to my idea of everyone taking summers off! Because if we all take the summer off then none of us are emailing or calling each other and we won’t ever fall behind! Yet, as genius as my idea is I regretfully realize that the chances of that ever actually happening are slim to none, so the only other thing to do is delete everything that came through while you were away and start fresh 🙂  Okay…okay…perhaps that would be a little too extreme, but I gotta tell you that today I came this close to doing just that.

I suppose the message I am really trying to convey here is that I don’t have a good solution for making life easier when you come back from taking time off…heck the only solution I can come up with at this point is to simply apologize for everyone whose emails I’m not getting to and apologize for anyone’s phone messages that aren’t being returned and to ask all of those same people to PLEASE take a little time off yourself!

Here’s hoping I’ll eventually catch up…like in the fall when the sun isn’t shining and the lake isn’t calling 🙂

~Amy Rees Anderson

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.