Summer holiday begins by switching out remote work clothes

It’s time for a this years summer holiday season. Woohoo or is it? Many of us try to switch work mode into holiday mood in 5 minutes by walking out from a remote workstation to another room. How to get into holiday mood if starting a holiday means staying at home after a long period of home officing? We gathered tips for remote workers on how to switch to the summer holiday mood.

“If you could leave your laptop in the office, say bye to your co-workers and close the office door, would you immediately feel more like it is a summer holiday?”

Admittedly, leaving on holiday from the office environment is a different matter than leaving on holiday from a remote work station. The landscape doesn’t change. And it’s not quite the same thing to wish ‘Happy summer vacay” in Slack than what it is at coffee room.

Your brain needs concrete reminders when changing from situation to another. External signs tell your brain how things will be in the future – what will happen. Switching your mind and brains to the holiday mode often requires something to remind that you are now on holiday, a concrete reminder that now it is time to chill out and rest! Our Heltti remote work experts shared a few tips on how to kick off your holiday this year.

Change remote work clothes to holiday clothes. Really, it works!

Now it’s time to throw remote work wear back into your closet for a moment. Dig out from the closet something you haven’t used in a while – at least during work. Put on clothes that remind you from holiday trip to Spain or the best moment of last summer. Your brain will get a concrete signal that now you don’t have to prepare for the work day.

Turn your remote workstation into summer side table

One of the most concrete and important things you can do right from the start of your holiday is to plug your power outlet off and shut down your computer. Put all work equipments in a box or a closet and keep those there till the end of summer holiday. The bravest ones even move furniture, change cushion covers, buy some flowers, or paint a wall.

Explore a new route to tell your mind it is summer holiday

Your mind likes routines. A great way to tell your mind and brain summer holiday has started, is to take a pick an unusual route and have a small transition jog. Walking from a remote workstation in kitchen to a living room is undeniably a bit of a short time to slip from one atmosphere to another. So put your sandals to your feet and go for a small walk, run, biking or what ever fits you right after the work day. At the same time, you let your brain ventilate and descend from the moods of the last day of work to summer holiday feelings. End your trip to the ice cream kiosk!

Make your first holiday morning surprising

How do you know on first Monday that you are on holiday? Is it a particularly good breakfast on the balcony? Reading a book in bed? A refreshing morning swim? A longer walk than usual with a dog? Or a morning playground break with the little ones in the family?

Think in advance what you can do on the first weekday on holiday differently from the usual remote day – it will tell your brain that you can relax now.

A few important tips to keep in mind:

• Take a short coffee break with colleagues before your holiday. Talk about the moods of the last Midsummer, the best summer tips or the newest ice cream tastes. Say holiday wishes aloud via video rather than as a simple text. Your brain registers the words spoken aloud and begins to cool down.
• Important: remove notifications from all work-related communication channels (Slack, email, Teams, WhatsApp groups ..)
• Sleep well. Sleep recovers the stressful mind from remote working particularly effectively. You may feel tired in the first days of your holiday and that’s just ok – it’s a sign to you that your brain needs rest after months of hard work.
• Do things that relax your body and mind – ventilate your brain, refresh your muscles. Now is also the time to just be still and have nothing to do – empty slots in your holiday plans are great for your brains!

Now that you are have switched your mind into a holiday mode and your working memory is empty…

..we thought of doing the thinking work for you by putting together a checklist how to make sure you can enjoy Finnish summer. When going on a summer holiday trip or to a cottage or boat, it is a good idea to prepare for a bad day and pack a small holiday medicine bag.

The well-equipped travel medicine bag contains e.g.

• Patches, bandages and disinfectant for small bumps and bruises. If you happen to get a bigger wound, clean the wound and cover it with a clean bandage. If the wound requires stitches, get yourself to a medical clinic within six hours at the latest, after which the wound can no longer be stitched.
• Summer and flies, but also mosquitoes and ticks… Make sure you have some Mosquito repellent with you and clothing that provides adequate coverage to protect against both mosquitos and ticks.
• A tick check in the evenings (including pets) is a good way to make sure there are no uninvited guests attached to the skin. In tick bites, the risk of Borrelia infection is low, if the tick can be removed within a day. It is advisable to remove the tick with tweezers. If the tick did attach to your skin, make sure that after removal of the mite and cleaning of the bite site you monitor it. If an expanding red area appears after about a week, contact medical professionals.
• Itching caused by insect bites can be helped by cortisone cream and, if necessary, an antihistamine tablet. Try not to scratch the injection site.
• And then there are the snakes. Snakes usually dodge people, but it is good to keep your boots on when walking off-road. However, if you happen to get bitten, you should always get yourself to the nearest emergency room immediately and keep the body as still as possible and the bite site as high as possible.
  If you have a snake bite package with you, you can take the cortisone tablets in the pack, but you still have to go to the emergency room without delay. Inflammatory pain medicine, on the other hand, should not be used to treat snake bites.
• Of course, it is a good idea to have painkillers in the well-equipped summer medicine bag for other possible aches.