Open Thread: Summer Vacation Plans?
July 4th, 2007 (5:31am) Anne Zelenka 9 Comments
Ah, summertime. Lazy days, holidays, vacation days. But are you too tired and burned out to benefit? A Yahoo! HotJobs survey says you might be:
Nearly half of the respondents (49%) said they feel “burned out” by their jobs, and many did not fully use vacation time as a remedy. Out of 1,800 professionals surveyed, 45% said they did not use all of their vacation days allotted in 2006, and 39% said they were too tired to take a “real” vacation during their days off.
Vacations can be stressful in themselves — they may be expensive and you might come back to an overload of work when you return. Sometimes it’s easier to just skip the trip.
I’m on vacation next week and thinking I will bring my laptop so I don’t get too far behind. I’ll hand off some of my regular responsibilities so I hope it will be a chance to feel extra-inspired rather than overstressed.
I don’t need a complete break from work, just enough space to think about things in a different way. As Ryan Healy says:
The problem with having an arbitrary ten or fifteen days of vacation where you can escape from your cubicle is that it implies we need to completely escape to stay sane. I don’t know about you guys, but if I need to pretend that work doesn’t exist when I am on vacation, then I am in the wrong line of work.
What are your vacation plans, if any, for this summer? Will you leave work completely behind?
Related:
9 Comments Post your own comment
Thejesh GN says: July 4th, 2007 8:09am
Late this year planning to go to Ladak (in Himalayas near to Tibet)
Len says: July 4th, 2007 8:49am
Since I haven’t had to work for the past 10 years, my time is spent doing pretty much what I want. Odd to realize that I have recreated precisely the same level of stress, deadlines, and lack of sleep I so resented when I was a corporate exec for a gas company. This makes “vacations” even more problematic. Vacation from what?
Last month I agonized over whether to take my laptop to St. John, USVI, for a 12-day sojourn with my wife and her family. I wanted to podcast while there, and maybe check e-mail occasionally. In the end, I decded to go cold turkey and left the computer home. It was a life-changing decision, and led to a new practice of moderating my e-mail checking (three times a day only, at 10, 2, and 4 just like the old Dr. Pepper ads), podcasting once a week instead of twice, vowing never to open the computer until after my morning exercise and zazen, and doing no computer work on Sundays. Several weeks afterward, these habits seem stable and incredibly freeing. After I returned, I put together this video podcast of scenes from my island idyll: http://lenchronicles.blogspot.com/2007/06/24-cold-turkey-in-paradise.html .
Anyway, I think an absolute break from all our net connections can be wildly renewing, and that the spiritual energy thus released might make plowing through the resultant backlog of e-mail a joyful, easy task.
Rob says: July 4th, 2007 9:05am
We were planning on weekends away - we have some rural property that has no cell phone or internet access. We’d go there every couple weekends because we already found out every weekend is too much.
Then we won tickets to a major music festival in our area so I’ll be taking a week away, no laptop or phone. It will be interesting to see how that works out. Good thing is we can camp at the festival so costs will be kept to a minimum however I’m already a little concerned about the work load when we come back.
But winning tickets to this is a once in a lifetime thing. Something we can’t pass up.
So we’ll skip other camping this month to focus on the week long festival and then go camping again for a couple more weekends in August before kids are back to school.
ianmack says: July 4th, 2007 9:43am
having just gone fully freelance, i’m looking forward to the wide open horizon. though i’m a self-confessed workoholic so i fully expect to recreate my workload in a short time. maybe i can bring my laptop to the beach instead of the office…
sarabocaneanu says: July 4th, 2007 9:58am
However much you might like your job, doing only that day in- day out will become extremely tiring. We need variation… and most of us can’t get nearly enough variation within a normal day or week. I usually take a week to go backpacking, and there’s a huge benefit from replacing worries about customers and deadlines with worries about the wind, the sun, rain, water sources, a pain in the knee etc. This does a wonderful job of placing life back in the proper perspective.
Christoph H. says: July 4th, 2007 1:36pm
I’m just these days out for a week of vacation. Only 400 kilometers away from home. We have free internet access in our room. So my father and I took our notebooks. So we have connection to our office and can react on important e-mails. Furthermore we can do things on the internet for which we don’t have time on normal work days.
Web Worker Daily » Archive Blogging: Not a Sweatshop « says: April 6th, 2008 9:55am
[...] a level of web work that allows you to have a life, with children and pets and regular meals and vacations. Of course, the folks who find a balance aren’t sensational enough to write news stories [...]
Antoinette says: May 24th, 2008 3:34pm
I can leave town. But it is really, really hard to complete disconnect. I have in the past but it is always such a chore when you get back online and have so much email and voicemail messages to go through. I need a personal assistant!
Bill-005 says: May 29th, 2008 5:14pm
My open vacation plan would have to be in the
Caribbean island of Dominican Republic, the DR has great vacations like charlisangels adult sex vacations in beach villas with great escorts at an all inclusive packages.