From Vox, “The average American gets 14 days off from work, according to an annual survey by the travel company Expedia, but actually uses only 10 of those days each year.”
Take a Vacation, Please
7 thoughts on “Take a Vacation, Please”
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Apt. 11d 
The story you linked is interesting. A lower percentage of people in the US feel they must stay connected with the office (67% in US vs over 90% in France, Mexico, Malyasia, Thailand or India) and 76% of people in the US feel their bosses are supportive of a vacation vs 65% worldwide.
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In my office, the people I work with directly are supportive of vacation. However we are running pretty lean and there’s no one to backfill my tasks when I’m gone. This means it’s a tremendous amount of work to get ready for vacation, and another hill to climb when you return.
To me this results in working 12-15 hour days every day the week before, with several hundred e-mails waiting for me when I return. I always return on a Saturday after vacation, leaving Sunday for clearing e-mail – because I will be expected to arrive at the office on Monday ready for meetings related to all the missed e-mail. Plus there’s the mess that accumulates when people untrained/unfamiliar with certain processes made decisions in my absence. (Witness the accounting clerk who helpfully sent out incorrect invoices, which I couldn’t review because I was on PTO, but which she sent anyway because she was getting deadline pressure.) Depending upon the vacation, sometimes it’s just not worth it.
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That’s an annoying graph — small numbers with a 50% baseline, making the decline look steeper than it is (though 80% to 50% is still big). I’d like to know how the number is calculated. As we know, in the discussion of contingent work, vacation isn’t meaningful in the sense that you have “14 days off” when you do not have paid vacation leave.
I’d also suspect that the greater use of vacation days to cover sick children and other care (which would have been covered by the non-working spouse in the old days) plays a role (in addition to Jen’s report, that vacation doesn’t decrease the amount of work that needs to get done, only the time in which it must be completed).
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The shift towards PTO instead of separate vacation and sick leave probably also matters. I was just surprised by the survey results. They were not what I expected.
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I am at the beach right now. Jellyfish are assholes.
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Just got back from a lovely week-long vacation. It was great but, wow, what a privilege to a) have the time off from work and b) have the resources to enjoy it.
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I took a week off this month. Got crap from some co-workers about how long I was gone. Took me three days to decompress! A day off here or there is for errands, projects, and appointments, not the time away from a stressful job needed for mental health. I am so grateful I have vacation time!
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