Why it’s so hard to take time off.
The glory of the grind | 4-min read
It’s fascinating how hard it is to take time off.
A few weeks ago, I ran off to Europe to celebrate my birthday and live the out of office life. It was also the one-year anniversary of my great resignation from corporate America, where my “unlimited vacation policy” was anything but. So I made a point of making the trip extra-long (a whole 5 weeks) – longer than any other vacation I’d ever taken and certainly beyond the realm of the corporately acceptable.
The first week was blissful, full of late mornings, long hikes, and tortillas españolas. The second week felt indulgent but deserved – vacation mode fully activated. But in the third week, the guilt set in, and my internal naysayer took the mic: I should check my emails. Do my clients think I’m lazy? What if I lose business? Steve Jobs probably never took time off. I’m a bad entrepreneur.
And then in week 4, the compound guilt arrived (the guilt for feeling guilty): Why do I feel bad? I’m the boss now! How many hours of vacation have I wasted worrying instead of enjoying it? I’m not being present. BE PRESENT.
Resting is hard work
As much as I’d like to claim I’m more neurotic than the average working professional, there’s a whole lot of evidence supporting the fact that I fall [un]comfortably in the majority. For centuries, philosophers, economists, psychologists and – most recently – millennial bloggers – have reflected on how difficult it is for us (and Americans in particular) to relax.
In my perfectly appropriate vacation reading, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman writes about the relentless pressure we feel to “make the most” of our limited time – a pressure that makes it nearly impossible for us to spend time doing anything we don’t consider “productive.” In our current reality, he writes,
“…your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed.”
This echoes themes that Jenny Odell explores in How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell explains how our economy and society are built to pull on our attention every second of the day, making it difficult to do anything that requires stillness or silence. In sum, as she writes,
“Doing nothing is hard.”
It doesn’t help that we are constantly bombarded with messages glorifying the grind: Rest is for the weak. Rise and grind. Work hard, play hard. What’s your side hustle? So that even if you do have vacation time, you really should be using it to launch an app, a non-profit, or at the very least, an Etsy shop. We are pushed, as Burkeman argues, to live “the fully optimized life.”
No wonder it’s so hard for us to sit still, guilt-free.
And that’s for those of us who are fortunate enough to have any vacation time at all. Remember, the US is the only “developed economy” in the world with no national paid vacation policy (you can read more about this in my piece, The No-Vacation Nation). This, plus the proliferation of gig-work that offers little benefit outside variable working hours, leaves millions of Americans financially unable to take time off.
And so it seems like the majority of the American workforce falls into one of two groups: those, like me, who technically have time off (but are full of guilt and never-ending notifications from colleagues and clients who prefer to ignore out-of-office auto-replies); and those who simply, unjustly, don’t get time off at all.
The repercussions of being rest-less
The consequences of a system where time off is either inaccessible or uncomfortable are huge. For humans, there is the obvious: burnout, exhaustion, stress, depression – all of which have hit record highs over the past two years.
And while organizations may seem to benefit from a workforce that never stops, they don’t. Productivity, culture, innovation, and retention all take a hit when employees are exhausted and unhappy…and this hit negatively impacts the ever-precious top-line of revenue and profit.
The prevalence of exhaustion has a tremendously negative impact on equity and inclusion, the area where I work. Burnt-out leaders, who often suffer just as much (if not more) as their teams from limited time off, have neither the time nor the energy to be thoughtful, conscious, and strategic in generating cultural and operational change – the very assets critical to DEI efforts. In this context, there’s no energy (or time) to do anything differently.
Breaking free
The demand for doing (and not doing) differently is rising. Workers of all collars, from warehouses to classrooms to investment banks are saying no more to the status quo; from a resurgence in unionization efforts to a rise in resignations, to the public calling-out of toxic company cultures, workers (or, humans, as I prefer to call them) are asserting their rights to a better balance of work and life. Forward-thinking organizations, seeing the need to “attract talent” are responding with better benefits. Even governments, as we saw with Portugal’s boss-text ban, are setting some new rules.
As I waded through my own discomfort with so much time off, questioning whether I deserved it, and calculating the potential opportunity cost of unanswered emails, I turned to the words of Tricia Hersey, artist, activist and founder of the Nap Ministry. Hersey reframes rest from a symbol of weakness or sin, to one of power and resistance to the structures that oppress us.
I called in to her Nap Hotline, where you can hear a recording of nap-spiration (1-833-LUV-NAPS). On that day, she offered this nugget,
“We can bend time when we rest, when we disrupt and disconnect from the systems that see us only as human machines, unworthy of rest. And we know that’s a lie.”
And so despite the discomfort and the catastrophizing and so many decades of productivity-conditioning, I reclaimed my time off. And I hope, should you be fortunate enough to have time off, you can, too.
