Coffeetime Science: How to Not Go into Overdrive Just Before You Go on Vacation

The manic last minute rush to finish things before you leave on vacation

Katja is back from her holidays, and we meet at the coffee machine. Narges just left for her vacation, but we know she’s with us in spirit – she sent us a photo of her drinking coffee on a boat on a lake in Guatemala. “Looks like Narges is having a terrible time”, I comment. “Yes, awful”, Katja agrees. We smile at each other and sit down by the windows. I’m next, I think to myself, one more week to go, then I’ll be at a beach with my family. “When do you leave?” Katja asks “and how are your stress levels?” “Medium-high to high”, I reply. “I know how you feel”, she adds, “I do the same thing before I go on holiday. I think Narges was pretty stressed, too”.

What Katja is referring to, is my (and evidently a lot of people’s) habit of trying to finish up a million things before going on holiday, most of which are not urgent, and also likely to take much longer to complete than I give myself time for. For some reason, my logical time planning goes out of the window as my vacation approaches, and I set ridiculously tight deadlines for myself, most of which I’m unlikely to meet. Finish up both manuscripts and send them out to all co-authors before I go. Finish up all administrative tasks and write up protocol for Elmo^* for CVD project before I go. Finish all ongoing data analyses before I go. Finish working off my email task list before I go (OK, that one is actually realistic). Finish EVERYTHING before I go. It’s weird that we do this, I muse. It’s not like any of these deadlines are necessary, or like I won’t be able to complete most of these tasks after I come back and still be well within the expected timeline.

Part of it is due to the fact that I don’t like to leave things unfinished (or, more precisely, to put things on hold) but part of it is also in order to compensate for the fact that I feel guilty about taking a long vacation. Why is that? I wonder. We are entitled to paid leave and everyone needs to take some time off every now and then. In fact, for most people, it is vital to their overall happiness and health. I always come back to work with new vigor and more focus after taking a couple of weeks off, and I find that my productivity is much higher for quite some time after a vacation. I should just do what I can before I go, and then deal with the rest when I come back.

As I count down to the last day before I leave, I find that I have accomplished a good amount of my self-imposed tasks, and I start to relax. One more thing on the to do list: Set up my out of office email reply. “See you in a couple of weeks!”

^*I don’t work on Sesame Street. These are super-secret code names for everyone I work with except for Katja and Narges.

About me: My name is Christine, and I am currently working as a research specialist at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After my undergraduate studies in Oxford, I moved to London for my PhD and first postdoc. After 7 years in this magnificent city, I was ready for an adventure and decided to go to Boston for 2 years for a second postdoc. As love and science made me swap rainy London for alternately deep-frozen or tropical Boston, 2 years turned into 5 (and counting), and I decided to deviate from the traditional academic trajectory to work as a staff scientist (the rather fancy title of my position is research specialist). Most days, I sit with post-docs and other staff scientists over lunch or coffee, and discussion topics range from the inane to career goals and options, our research, new techniques and technology and the like. I would like to share some of those topics with you in this blog. Want to join in? Grab yourself a cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, read along, and leave comments. You can read my other blog posts here.