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The holidays are here and that means that you might be figuring out who has to work over this time and who gets time off. If you’re an IT professional, you might be hoping to get a moment of peace and quiet in an empty office over the holidays.
As IT professionals, we want to celebrate the holidays, but there are always projects that can only be done over a day off. Take Thanksgiving for instance. You can eat with your family on Thursday but then come in on Friday to do a major rollout on things like phones or swap out a couple of servers. This is sometimes the ideal situation for IT professionals. You can still celebrate with your loved ones, but you also get to really get stuff done without interruption or calls coming in. A quiet office is also a great break from those loved ones after a holiday spent together.
Say you came in on the Friday following Thanksgiving and got lots of stuff done. This allows you to monitor that progress over the weekend and fix any bugs or problems that might take place without interruption still.
These holidays can become like custody battles. While many professionals are trying to get time off for the holidays, IT professionals are typically debating over who gets to work certain holidays or periods of time following the holidays in order to get done with everything they’re hoping to.
This is called change management, which is super important in the IT world. The holidays are generally where we center this change management. Weekends work alright, but holidays are the best time to make big changes and implement new technologies.
Holidays can be a conflicting time as well. The personal side also comes into play. Family is very important, and spending time together is what the holidays are all about. Balancing this family time and also getting stuff done for work can be a complicated game to play. If you absolutely love your job, this becomes even more difficult. But, if you can learn to balance these two things, the holidays will be both a special time of togetherness and a time of solitude work.
There is another aspect to holidays that most people don’t think about, and that is the fact that, worldwide, we all celebrate different holidays. Some holidays are universal while others are very specific to a region and it is important to keep these in mind when deciding when to work and when to take a break. You might also be able to let another take care of what you’re trying to accomplish if they are in another region and working when the United States is celebrating a holiday.
If you’re a business professional, it could be beneficial to have a conversation with your IT staff and figure out if they actually want the time off over the holiday season or if they would benefit from working one or two days in order to work in a quiet office, uninterrupted.