You took a week off. You also checked Slack from a beach chair, twice a day, every day. That is not a vacation. That is working in worse clothes. And next year it will happen again, unless you change the one thing that makes it repeat.
The half-vacation, described
You know the shape of it. You set an away message. You told the team you would be unreachable. And then, on the second morning, you opened your laptop "just to make sure nothing was on fire." Something was. Not a real fire, but a question only you could answer. You typed for ten minutes. The rest of the day, part of your head stayed at work.
Why you check, honestly
You are not checking because you cannot let go. You are checking because you know what happens if you do not. Someone will get stuck on a thing only you know. They will wait, or guess, or make the call without the context you have. The mess will be waiting when you get back, larger than if you had just answered the question from the beach.
So you check. It is the rational move. That is exactly why it repeats. The guilt is not the driver. The math is. You have quietly decided that ten minutes on the beach is cheaper than a pile of half-made decisions waiting for you at home, and you are probably right.
The away message does not answer anything
Your out of office note tells people you are gone. It does not tell them what they need. "Back Monday, contact someone else for urgent items" pushes the problem onto a person who does not actually know your work, or it leaves the question to sit until Monday. Either way the answer does not arrive while you are away. It just gets delayed or dumped. So people ping you anyway, and you, knowing this, keep the laptop close.
Why next year is the same
Nothing about the setup changed. The knowledge is still only in your head. Being off still means the answers are off too. So the only way to protect the team is to stay a little bit on, which means the vacation is half a vacation, again. The pattern is not a willpower problem. It is a structure problem. As long as your absence equals an answer blackout, you will keep breaking your own time off to prevent it.
What a real week off requires
To actually leave, one thing has to be true: your teammates can get answers to the routine questions without you. Not from a stand-in who guesses, and not from a doc nobody updated. From your own words, captured before you left, that respond to the real question and point at the source.
That is what StandIn is for. You write a short brief about your own work, and while you are gone, it answers your teammates from what you wrote, with a source under each answer. When the answer is not in what you wrote down, it says so, instead of making something up in your name. The truly urgent things still find you. Everything else gets handled without pulling you back to the laptop.
The version worth taking
A vacation you fully take is not one where nothing happens at work. It is one where the questions that come up get answered from what you already knew, without needing you awake and online to type them. That is the difference between a week away and a week of working from somewhere prettier. You can take the first one. It just requires your absence to stop meaning silence.
When you're off, your StandIn is on.
It answers your teammates' questions from work you've already done, in your words, with a source under every answer.