> The new report found that one-third of workers aren’t spending their vacation on leisure because they’re using it to recover from exhaustion. That rate was highest among millennials, at 43 percent, followed by 34 percent of Gen X, 33 percent of Gen Z and just 20 percent of baby boomers.
> The survey also found that higher earners were 26 percent more likely to use PTO for sleep than those earning under $100,000. On average, Americans who took PTO for sleep used two to three days to catch up.
I feel like I could certainly use a week of PTO to catch up on sleep!! Maybe 2-3 days to relax and 3 days to do all the chores around the house I never have time for.
> Some people feel like their vacations are more work than the actual vacation was supposed to be
This is me. Vacations are not relaxing. Travel is exhausting. Sleeping in a hotel bed is not restful. Running around all day packing in "new experiences" is exhausting.
To me a vacation is doing nothing. No plans. No goals. Just let the days unfold.
Yeah I do not get this mentality at all. So many people in beautiful locations seem obsessed with just recording the experience, and maximizing the number of things recorded, than actually living it. And of course the reality is that those images/videos will just get posted on social media and then forgotten forever, maybe shown to a friend every once in a blue moon. It's not like somebody's going to look at his half assed video of a waterfall months later and be like 'ahhhh - relaxing.'
An Amerisleep.com survey of more than 1,200 Americans revealed that 37 percent used vacation days in the past year just to rest.
I’d like to see the wording of this survey.
If it’s something like ‘did you use vacation time to rest?’, it seems to me that it’s likely to always have got a large percentage of ‘yes’ answers. Isn’t that partly what vacation has always been for?
When I was a hot shit young programmer being underpaid, I tried several times to negotiate a shorter work week in lieu of more money. My theory was either Friday afternoon or better Monday morning so I could sleep in a bit after the weekend. Until recently I was a night owl. And the problem with trying to take a trip out of town on the weekend is that if your flight is delayed or you just want to save money, it’s much easier to guarantee you’re home by 9 am on Monday than by 11pm on Sunday night. If anything goes wrong with your transportation you end up with a more stressful Monday.
Later when I had flexible hours I was able to sustain a middle distance relationship by working 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday and beating Friday traffic out of town to go see her.
I still think everyone in software should be working 32 hours a week. I’ve been vocal in the past about making that a four day week, but it’s the morning commute and the lunch break epiphanies that really make the 8 hour day a lie, and I worry that taking one of those day away would have a bigger negative effect on productivity than taking 1.6 hours away from every day, the first hour or so of which is emphatically a productivity/hour boost.
I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over?
What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.
> What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting?
It's the "just you know...resting" one that might be a problem. It's not the resting itself that is a problem. Everybody needs to rest. The problem is when people need to take PTO in order to get time for that rest.
Any reasonable job already includes enough time off that workers should be able to get all the rest they need without having to use up some of their PTO.
The time off doesn't come with a mandate to go somewhere else - it's just time off from work. If I went somewhere, I'd be just as tired as if I didn't; it would just be a different kind of tired.
14 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 41.9 ms ] thread> The survey also found that higher earners were 26 percent more likely to use PTO for sleep than those earning under $100,000. On average, Americans who took PTO for sleep used two to three days to catch up.
I feel like I could certainly use a week of PTO to catch up on sleep!! Maybe 2-3 days to relax and 3 days to do all the chores around the house I never have time for.
This is me. Vacations are not relaxing. Travel is exhausting. Sleeping in a hotel bed is not restful. Running around all day packing in "new experiences" is exhausting.
To me a vacation is doing nothing. No plans. No goals. Just let the days unfold.
https://www.ecosa.com.au/blog/post/inemuri-the-japanese-art-...
I’d like to see the wording of this survey.
If it’s something like ‘did you use vacation time to rest?’, it seems to me that it’s likely to always have got a large percentage of ‘yes’ answers. Isn’t that partly what vacation has always been for?
Later when I had flexible hours I was able to sustain a middle distance relationship by working 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday and beating Friday traffic out of town to go see her.
I still think everyone in software should be working 32 hours a week. I’ve been vocal in the past about making that a four day week, but it’s the morning commute and the lunch break epiphanies that really make the 8 hour day a lie, and I worry that taking one of those day away would have a bigger negative effect on productivity than taking 1.6 hours away from every day, the first hour or so of which is emphatically a productivity/hour boost.
What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.
It's the "just you know...resting" one that might be a problem. It's not the resting itself that is a problem. Everybody needs to rest. The problem is when people need to take PTO in order to get time for that rest.
Any reasonable job already includes enough time off that workers should be able to get all the rest they need without having to use up some of their PTO.
So, rest and sleep, at home, works for me.