Excuses to Skip a Work Offsite

The offsite is two days of workshops wrapped in two days of travel, held somewhere with a lake and no phone signal, and it will conclude with the same three action items as the last one. Everyone knows this. The organiser knows it too, which is why the agenda contains a session called 'Where Do We Go From Here' scheduled for the graveyard slot after lunch. The strong reasons to skip are all about proportion. A full day of flights each way for a day and a half of sessions is an argument anybody can follow. Being in one session out of five is another. So is being mid-migration with a cutover on the Thursday, which is the kind of detail that ends the discussion because nobody wants to own the alternative. The things people forget to say, and should: that you'll take the readout, and that you'll send your input as a document beforehand so the session you'd have been in still works. An absent colleague who contributed in writing is a rounding error. An absent colleague who contributed nothing is a topic. Below are ten excuses to skip a work offsite, plus twenty in the generator.