I just got back from ten days away with my family. It was an actual break, not the kind of vacation that quietly turns into a slower version of work with emails being checked daily. I did my best to log off and stay off.

In the DC area, there is a particular status game around overwork. People signal how many hours they put in, how late they answered emails, how indispensable they have made themselves. The implication is that volume equals value, and that being hard to replace is the same as being good at the job. I am not sure those are the same thing. Sometimes the person who cannot step away for a week has not built something that runs without them. They have built a dependency. That can be a delegation problem and a time management problem wearing the costume of dedication.

Honestly, the timing of this vacation wasn’t great. I set this vacation before I took the job. It turns out June and July are busy stretches at my new organization. Knowing what I know now, I would think twice before choosing this window again. But sometimes personal plans aren’t perfectly aligned with work schedules. Fortunately, the busy season did not mean the trip had to come apart.

I made it work using preparation rather than presence. Before I left, I put the things that needed momentum into motion. (I even scheduled two blog posts.) I made a list to structure my return so that I would not walk back into chaos. I will not pretend it was seamless. A few items depended specifically on me, hiring decisions among them, and I checked in on those to keep them moving. That is the exception to my usual practice, which is to schedule and plan time off so that even those dependencies are covered before I go.

I believe you should be able to step away for a meaningful stretch and have the work continue. If everything halts the moment you log off, that tells you something about how the work has been structured, not about how important you are. Getting away also does something I cannot replicate at my desk. Distance lets me process. The problems I was too close to look different from a few hundred miles away.

There is one more reason this matters, and it is the one I take most seriously. I expect my time off to be respected. I cannot ask for that and then fail to model it for the people who work with me. When my team takes their time, that time should be theirs. If I answer emails from the beach and praise the colleague who does the same, I am teaching everyone that rest is optional and that the people who matter never fully leave. That is not the culture I want to build. The way I treat my own vacation is a message about how I will treat theirs.

So no, I did not win any bragging rights this month. I am back, I am reenergized for having left, and the work kept moving while I was gone.