5 things to do before time off at work [and how Jira can help]

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Are you dreaming of some beautiful place on your holiday? Taking a vacation is essential for every employee to avoid burnout and increase efficiency. It surely reduces stress for that week or two, but what comes after? If you don't thoroughly plan for it, you can come back feeling much more anxious than before. So, here, we’ve prepared a list of things to do before your time off to return to work smoothly. We’ll overview different tools, including Jira.

• If you can’t stop thinking about work during vacation
• If you don’t like routine and administrative work
• If you are returning to work even more stressed than you felt before vacation

Then, keep reading 😉

1. Create a checklist 

Creating checklists is always a good idea if you have recurring tasks. In fact, it’s worth having a checklist for your everyday assignments anyway. It could include any items like checking your inbox, meeting with teammates, creating some reports, etc. So that when you are going on vacation and need to appoint some person to perform your most important tasks, you will already have a checklist to follow. Or you can create several checklists like “must-do before time off” and “top priority tasks after you come back”.

2. Arrange your Google calendar

Let people know that you will be away, especially if you have some meetings arranged during your vacation. Google Calendar has a great option called out-of-office. It enables you to set aside the time you'll be absent and rejects any meetings scheduled during that period. The good news is that the out-of-office feature will also automatically deny any following requests made of you during that period, saving you from having to decline the meetings manually you'll have to miss.

3. Turn the Gmail vacation mood ON

The next thing worth doing is setting an out-of-office message in Gmail. People become irritated if you don't reply to emails right away, so you should let them know if you'll be absent from the office, even for a day. Gmail vacation responder makes it possible to notify any person who is will contact you during vacation. You just need to set dates when you are away, add the subject and message you want to send. You can also decide whether your reply goes to everyone, just your contacts, or only those in your company.

4. Set recurring tasks in Jira

If you have a checklist for your regular assignments, as advised in point 1 of this article, you can make it works even smarter. Transfer your recurring tasks into Jira issues. Jira is a great tool when it comes to task management, and in combination with Recurring Checklists and Report, you can get the most out of this process. This plugin can be like your vacation manager for Jira. It helps to create a separate issue/task for each item from the to-do list automatically.

So, if you have some critical issues to do while you are away, you can assign them to another responsible person or several people and add instructions. All the tasks will be created on the scheduled dates and for the specific assignee.

5. Stop automation if you don’t need it

In case you don't want to delegate your tasks to someone else, you can simply postpone the automation for some time. Recurring Checklists and Report app released new features to help with this problem. You can set everything according to your requirements.

• If you need to create some task out of a schedule that you specified, use the “Run now feature”. It allows you to start a task with a checklist right now, and then this task will be created according to the schedule that is configured in the checklist.
• Enable/Disable recurring task creation in Jira. That feature was developed for those cases when you are away (on vacation, sick leave, days off, etc.). So, you can automatically pause the recurrence of important assignments and later resume them.

Takeaway

All those tools described above are your little helpers when it comes to planning your vacation. Checklists, Google Calendar, Gmail vacation email and Jira with Recurring Checklists and Report plugin can do some magic tricks while you are away. You can adjust everything according to your needs and enjoy your vacation with a refreshing mojito in your hand instead of checking your messages or worrying about tasks in Jira.

There is a free 30-day trial of Recurring Checklists and Report, so you can check it out and try to create your checklist before going on holiday or for any other reason.