System iNetwork

May 21, 2007

Are You Too Busy to Take a Summer Vacation?

With Memorial Day weekend upon us, it's official! Summer has snuck up on us again. So although I had a software topic picked out to get into today, let's put that off and this week talk about something really fun: Time off!

Or, how impossible it can be to actually take time off. What got me thinking about this (besides looking in dismay at my wall calendar) was that Yahoo HotJobs ( http://hotjobs.yahoo.com ) issued a press release this morning about a survey it just completed on U.S. workers and their vacations.

I'm in no position to evaluate Yahoo's methodology, so I'm just going to assume for the sake of argument that the survey findings are at least approximately correct. While the survey purports to apply to U.S. workers as a whole, I think it's fair to presume that IT workers in the System i market, if not actually worse off, are somewhere in the same ballpark . . . but what a sad venue that is if Yahoo's statistics are true.

Apparently, although 74 percent of U.S. workers get at least two weeks of paid vacation, 45 percent of those same workers didn't use all their vacation time in 2006. Why? Because 36 percent feel they have too much work to do, 34 percent feel they can't afford to go away, 32 percent prefer to preserve and roll over their vacation for emergencies, and 15 percent are anxious about the workload they'll face when they return from any significant time off. Doesn't that sound strangely familiar?

Not only that, but among those who did take their time off, 28 percent limited themselves to only one or two consecutive days at a time. Perhaps that's at least partly because of some other statistics Yahoo reported. Of those surveyed, 30 percent use vacation time as "mental health days," 31 percent use them to run errands or catch up on housework and other personal business, and 32 percent use them to interview for new jobs -- all of which seem to encourage a onesy-twosey philosophy towards vacation-day use.

Let's skip the usual digression you might be expecting here about how workaholic we all are and the habitual envious statements about Europeans ("Hey, Charlie, is it six days a week, six weeks a quarter, or six months a year paid vay-cay those guys get?"). I will note that I went to a one-day seminar for editors last week, and the seminar leader's observation (which was contested by none of the 60 or so people attending) was that "strict" editing styles are vanishing because workloads are so high that few can afford to spend enough time on any one piece of copy to apply truly strict editing practices anymore. Many IT and other kinds of workers are facing the same kind of reality.

And this doesn't just apply to vacations. Last November, CCH, Inc. ( http://www.hr.cch.com ), a company that provides business and corporate law information services, issued results of a survey it did on employee use of sick time. That study noted 66 percent of respondents said they didn't take sick days even when they were sick because they had too much work or were afraid of missing a deadline, and 56 percent said no one was available to cover for them. The bottom line for both vacations and sick time is that for many people there's too much to do and no one who can take up the slack if a worker is out of the office for any reason. Under these conditions, not taking vacation can seem not so much a self-deprivation as it is a smart move in the game of catastrophe management.

Yet we all know that it's unwise to do this. The whole point of time away from work is that we need the mental recharge we get from spending time with people and pastimes we enjoy, and even just the release of thinking about something other than the to-do list on our desks for a while. Often when we return, we think better and work more efficiently. If it wasn't for that benefit, probably few companies would even offer vacations. Modern life is stressful enough, even if you never watch the news, that we need our days off.

Of course, if you're one of the 26 percent that Yahoo says doesn't even get a vacation, you have the sympathy of all the rest of us. But even those who get paid vacations can face considerable restraint on their freedom to actually take advantage of it.

Will this summer find you in the "no-vacation" metaphorical boat rather than in an actual one with a fishing pole in your hand -- or whatever it is you'd rather be doing than staring at stuff 20 inches from your nose most of the day? What's your biggest fear about taking (gasp!) five consecutive days off? Is it do-able for you, even if only once in a while . . . or is it always asking for more trouble than it's worth?

Posted by at May 21, 2007 2:24 PM