sometimes I wonder if it's even worth taking vacation...
then I slap myself back into sanity.
I've been taking a Monday here and there for mental health, and even tacked an extra day onto a 3 day holiday weekend or two. While nice, they're still just enough to let you know that you need more days strung together in order to really unwind.
At my job the coming back seems to be hit or miss, whether it's from a single day or a whole week. I've come back from one or two days off and after checking my workload ended up even more wound up than before the time off. Happened once or twice from the full weeks off too.
But after talking with my boss about it, lately it has been pretty good. Coming back in to just whatever would normally be in my queue on any given day, rather than having everything just pile up while I'm gone.
I explained that the time off was to unwind and that you shouldn't come back to a situation even more stressful than the one you tried to escape in the first place.
We all have our little specialties and we assign each other the requests as they come in based on what type of request it is. But most of us can perform each others roles just fine.
For example my boss and I usually handle anything related to network accounts, Citrix, remote access, and email. I do most of it when I'm around the idea being for me to free him up for more important stuff. But he and I are the only ones fully versed in all of the intricate protocols involved, so he has to sub in for the majority of requests that would normally go my way. Some of the other nightly scheduled routine type stuff like report downloads and file staging is usually covered by one of the others in our group remotely from home.
They used to (knowing I'd be back someday) just keep assigning me work over the days I was out, and I'd come back up to a week behind. I told them to pretend I was never coming back.
/rambling