Releasing the Pedal

On vacation, chill, not working, and work

It took a while…

I had originally wanted to write and publish this in the last week of August when my first-ever vacation would have come to an end. But I felt giving it a couple of more weeks for the post-vacation work to settle in would provide me better contrasts around the phases more clearly. ‘Two weeks’ has zoomed to become almost a month. Hence, the final draft of the piece is getting ready now on 21st September 2024, and this covers the run-up to the vacation (10th to 15th August 2024), the period of vacation (15th to 25th August 2024), and post-vacation (26th August to 6th September). I blame the additional delay on the post-vacation ramp up period (read - grueling work schedule) as well as a bit of my own laziness.

Prelude

I have never taken a vacation during work. And, no - that does not mean I have not had periods of breaks. Let me explain.

After I completed my engineering degree, there was a two-month break between the day I vacated hostel up until the day I joined my first-ever workplace. This was way back in 2017.

In 2018, when I moved out from the first workplace to the second, there was a 26-day break.

In 2021, before the first day of Term 1 at MDI Gurgaon, I had a two-month break from April to July.

In 2022 again, after the completion of summer internship, there was a brief break of over 2-3 weeks (I guess - this period has been a blur, so not able to pinpoint specifics)

So, as you might wonder, over a period of little over 7 years since 2017, I have had at least 6 months of vacation. Which is… not bad. I mean, thinking about it, it is almost a month for every year - very generous, in fact. European-ish, if I may call it that.

And, that raises the more pertinent question. Is ‘first-ever vacation’ an overstatement?

THE Vacation

I have never really understood the need for vacation. Work meant work, and non-work hours and weekends could be utilized for pastime, hobbies, and generally being aimless. In fact, I have felt guilty about the thought of vacation in the first place. Apart from the one or two sick leaves, I never really went on a week-long holiday of sorts at my first workplace (2017-18). At the second, I maintained a 100% attendance (2018-19). At the third, work was not really confined to specific days, so I showed up almost daily - 7 days a week, that is - with some sort of negotiable flexibility around “work hours” (2019-20). At the fourth again, apart from the week before CAT - the dreaded admission examination to the business schools in India - I never really took any leaves (2020-21).

Thinking about it now, I was probably the living version of what an ideal employee - from the perspective of Mr. Narayana Murthy or Mr. Shantanu Deshpande or Mr. Kunal Shah - should be, or a work slave, in the more commonly-used non-podcasting slang.

In that context, the “first vacation” meant a big deal.

Ready?

Honestly, I had mixed feelings about going away from work for over a week. I was obviously extremely happy since this was for my engagement, and I would be seeing my until-recently-girlfriend-now-fiancée who was coming on holidays to India from Deutschland, but there was an equal measure of peak anxiety. Despite my teammates and friends reiterating to me that there are managers and executive leaders who go on holidays for a week and if they could manage, surely my role was not that important to prevent a time-off, the idea felt nauseating. It was MY WORK, right?

In organizational design, I have heard that an employee moves from the role of an ‘individual contributor’ to that of a ‘manager’ when they learn to straddle two aspects simultaneously:

1. Be extremely rigorous at the work and have high expectations for work product

2. Be prepared to delegate and NOT be the owner of everything concerned with the work product

In simple terms, people call this extensive degree of ownership as ‘micro-management’. But hey, I was still an individual contributor, you know? So, my work was my work. I have huge career aspirations, and I don’t want my work to go haywire because of the holiday. On the other hand, this was possibly the most important personal life event for me - something she and I had worked towards for several years. I should have ideally been at a place where I would be ready to resign in case my workplace did not allow me a holiday - but I was not (the firm granted me holidays anyway, so I did not have to resign).

There are multiple reasons behind this emotional rollercoaster of contradictions, but I thought about it and kind of boiled it down to two or three:

Job vs. career

I always thought my age gave me a better advantage in relation to my peers working at the same level as me. This was true with my peer group during MBA as well; I belonged to the outlier cohort of fairly older folks (that is, those above 25 years of age at the time of admission) and this has been true at the firm as well. Evidently, there are clear advantages stemming out of age. However, there was a crucial difference between people of my age at the same or higher level, and me : the career path.

Thanks to all the switches and transitions, even a relatively longer timeline at work did not translate to me having held a role that could clearly be classified ‘managerial’ in nature. Hence, while I had imbibed the useful traits of long hours, endurance, compensating lack of skill with efforts, and more, these were all self-defining in nature. Sure, a persistent psychotic hard-worker is important but not sufficient.

I had never managed a fairly decent-sized team, never worked in enterprises with a large headcount, and most importantly even in a small company, had never stayed on long enough for me to ‘make progress’. I was always possessive about my work, and could not imagine the thought of someone else doing it for me.

Self-esteem and solicitation

The first one, though seemingly straightforward now, itself was a light-bulb moment. After this dawned upon me, I just immediately called my friend who I had been pushing to transition out of his organization for greener pastures to STOP hunting for jobs. He was taken aback for a second when I told, in an uncharacteristically stern tenor, “Stay some more time. You will realize why later.”

And when I disconnected the phone and lay there looking at the ceiling, a couple of other aspects fell into place as well.

The first was a deeper realization around self-esteem. My self-esteem has always been tied back to my work. My college-mates would have realized this since I never used to participate in activities that I deemed were ‘waste of time’. At work, one of my peers even gave a feedback during the mid-year review cycle that read, “I would want Giri to stand up and walk around once in a while in the office. He sits for prolonged hours in the same posture in his work chair, and that is not healthy.” I tried prodding along and asking more leading questions to myself, and slowly started figuring out how a lot of things added up. My first workplace has been a permanent scar - the fact that I was publicly humiliated by my manager for supposedly ‘bad work’, was told that I would never be a good corporate fit, was badgered and harassed with unnecessary meeting after unnecessary training, has been etched. And since 2018, I have always been on what I call a ‘rageful ride’. Every time I remembered the “You are not a corporate fit; why do you guys come from towns like Cuddalore into such roles when you know you cannot match up?” monologue from my first manager, I used to either cry or clench my fists. The former slowly disappeared out of my system and the latter became a way of transformative strength. Though this has meant I have a huge self-discipline and focus, the downsides are also palpable - I cannot think of life outside work as a separate entity, I cannot think of pastimes as mere pastimes (like how I used to up until 2017), and so on. This was a self-esteem problem that prevented me from letting go of my work during the course of the holiday.

The other one, of course, is something that people would have practiced as a trait to be called out as a ‘weakness’ in job interviews - Asking for help. I am extremely hesitant in seeking help because I already have a very low view about myself - that I do not know a lot, that I do not work as hard as several others of my age in the world do, that I have not achieved anything significant worthy of my existence yet - coupled with the hit to the self-esteem that my first manager has provided forever (But let me also, in typical B-school interview fashion, but with truthfulness this time, say that I have genuinely been trying to shed this aspect and ask for help from a lot of people as and when needed). So, it was not easy transitioning ‘my work’ temporarily to people who would ‘stand in’ for me in my absence.

Set?

The panic and anxiety around having to go away from work manifested in different forms. In addition to just informing about the updates around transitions to the internal and external stakeholders, I sent a 5-pager document to the entire team giving them updates about milestones and action items, just so that an alternative’s alternative can step in in the event that the alternative had to go on leave. Deep down, I knew these were rare exigencies, and the team would already have self-correcting mechanisms to rectify these unexpected situations.

It indicated two sides of my relationship with work to me in retrospect:

1. I was really very sincere with work, and had taken into account all possible circumstances for my time off.

2. I considered myself too important, and assumed that I would be leaving a large void (my friend kept telling me, “Remember? Two reporting managers of us on the team went on vacation for a week or more at the same time, and we still managed without them. If that can happen, this can happen too. Go and have fun, man” - but as must be obvious by now, I was tone-deaf to all inputs)

Finally, it was time to shut down the laptop on 14th August but I kept working until very late into the night when the country was waking up to its 78th Independence Day already. In emergency situations, my teammates could anyway WhatsApp/call me, so at some point, I felt like I could log off and be done.

Go…!

After all, 15th August was a national holiday so I had the freedom (pun unintended) of waking up late into the day. Evidently, I was still in the ‘work mode’ so the extra hours of sleep made me wonder if I would be losing the momentum of being brisk during every single day of my vacation, which would then have a tangible impact on my work productivity when I stepped back for work post-holidays.

And thus, it was clear that the vacation was going to be an internal battle more than anything.

Occupied vs. Idle

Thanks to all the shopping and excitement, 15th August to 19th August were completely occupied, and hence I did not have much time to think or guilt-trip about work anyway. 20th and 21st were the two days when things started getting weird; we were done with all shopping and the ceremony was on 22nd. So, the idea was for all of us to rest enough so that physically and mentally we were all ready on the D-Day.

Fair enough?

When I woke up on 20th August, I honestly did not know what to do. I had no reason to step out, and had specifically been instructed not to step out too much in the sunny weather. Back in 2017, I would have just opened my bookshelf, picked up a random book, and started reading it - perhaps completing it at one stretch. Way back in 2013, such a day would have meant a few hours of continuous singing. Even in 2019, I would have opted to sleep and at least take rest. But in 2024, I was feeling restless.

Simulating a rehabilitation program

Have you ever been to a rehabilitation program for smokers or alcoholics, either as a visitor or as a participant? You could see folks losing it over not being able to smoke or drink, especially in the initial days of letting go. The smoker cohort particularly exhibits some visible gestures like holding their fingers in a tight grip as if getting ready to punch someone, grunting and biting their teeth to simulate the idea of a cigarette placed in between the two rows of teeth, and some of them even go to a slightly violent method of beating their chest just to get the thrill of palpitation that happens during a smoke. The alcoholics are different - they keep pacing really fast here and there in short distances with such speed that it would be head-spinning after a couple of paces for a non-participant there; sometimes, they eat hot, fried food to try and replicate the idea of a hot drink running down their throats.

I was going through a variation of it, from a workaholic perspective. At some point into the third hour mark after waking up on August 20th, the work table seemed like my cigarette or a bottle of alcohol that was designed to entice me. The work laptop was there on the table, and it was in ‘Sleep’ mode so all I had to was open it and start working. Resisting the urge, I paced here and there, took a four-story descension using stairs as opposed to utilizing the lift, walked until the corner of the street, and came back again. The next 30-45 minutes went by with me cleaning the room and the hall. This was becoming a nightmare. I was becoming that ghost that kept asking for work from its master and kept completing all tasks in a jiffy. As I passed my work table, I almost took a seat in the work chair, all ready to open the laptop. Shrugging it off, I showered for the second time in a span of 4 hours. I tried reading a book but could not go past 7 pages, attempted to sing something but somehow there was no enthusiasm. This was getting extremely frustrating by then. Switching on the air-conditioner and slowing down the fan, I tried sleeping in the usually pleasant condition that would make me doze off. After 25 minutes of forcibly keeping eyes closed, I could not sleep. Ugh!

Impulsively, I just walked over to the laptop, opened it, entered the password and stared at the Home Screen for a while. After a minute or so, it occurred to me that I must not be working and hence I shut it down - this time a proper shut down and not really a sleep or a hibernation. “Nope, I am supposed to NOT work”.

I tried calling and speaking to my friends just in the pretext of inviting them - for one last time - for the engagement, but every time the conversation went beyond 3 minutes or so, I noticed myself getting distracted and not focusing on the conversation. And for the first time, I sensed the problem - I could not pass time, I could not engage in a proper conversation, and I could not absorb myself in any concentrated task other than the ones that paid my bills. And for the first time, I felt all alone after years, ironically at a time when the ‘Single’ tag was going away and a partner was ‘officially’ entering my life.

The last day

The last day of my vacation before having to go on nitro-boost mode should have ideally been a relief for me, since staying away from work was the dealbreaker. However, it was not that straightforward. After spending the entire day with the partner, when I reached back home in the night, there was a clear confusion. Was I ready to go back to work? Did the vacation actually serve its purpose? Should I be extending it by a week and chill for some more time?

The questions were haunting and daunting, and none of them had direct answers. I surely had a lot of problems that had to be rectified, and the solutions had to come from within. The core realization was that when I wore multiple hats, the identity was not tied to one and hence it was easier to get detached and attached as required. But the last 9-12 months have mostly been focused towards work, work output, work rigor, and work focus; while I was under the impression that the idea of ‘bettering my case’ for a potential mobility to Europe was the catalyst behind all of that, I was not entirely right in that hypothesis. It was a major self-realization issue; I had lost all my hobbies, all my abilities, all my natural joys with the exception of writing here occasionally (more like ranting, but in a rather structured manner) in pursuit of acquiring an ‘identity’ for myself at work.

The seeds were probably thrown during the B-school days. Again here, there was a light-bulb moment. I did not vest myself with loads and loads of work because others asked me to, but because I felt trapped with the idea of having to spend over 20 lakh rupees in a span of two years to get myself a Masters degree. The thought of ‘having to extract the best use of that amount of money’ was what had coaxed me. This was in sheer contrast to what I had experienced during undergrad wherein the overall expense for a 4-year course was less then 4 lakh rupees, including all the pocket money and miscellaneous expenses (perks of having studied from one of the most prestigious state-run engineering institutions of the country).

Now that the ‘rigor’ has become so ingrained, and the misleading correlation between rigor and work-that-pays has been established as the only link, I realize the disentangling process is going to be much harder than I had imagined.

Thoughts and self-reflections

Just like an individual’s worldview around money, materials, relationships get formed over a period of time, an adult’s perception of work and identity get glued over a fairly long span. This means the detox - or disentanglement - would take its own sweet time too. My priorities were different up until 2017, but a toxic boss that shook the very core of my self-respect and identity has had a rather drastic impact on how things have changed over the last seven years. Questions such as “Should I have let him be such a crucial influence in my life?”, “Why am I viewing my work accomplishments or non-achievements as a metaphor of throwing shit on his face?” keep lingering. At the other end of the spectrum, I also keep pondering upon whether I would have been a corporate professional at all if not for that motivating rage.

The alternate redirection to that question that I keep posing to myself is, “Fair enough! Work need not be your identity. What else can be?” And, it is not easy to circumvent this question although ‘life coaches’ and ‘influencers’ (the line between these two are getting blurred with every passing day, though) say it should be. Work can get me a transfer to Europe, and possibly nothing else within the ambit of my current skillsets can. I can potentially invest time in cultivating new skillsets but they would take their time to compound and give me a competitive advantage - time which I cannot afford right now.

However, does that mean I have done the right thing by shedding the regular habit of reading to becoming someone who does not even read the newspaper articles? Would that mean I can become so entitled to get distracted in a span of 3-5 minutes, even during a conversation with possibly the best friend I have ever had in my life?

The vacation gave me the opportunity to simulate, to think, to actually go deep into the blackhole of these chaotic dilemmas. However, answers are to be found yet.