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Is vacation the remedy for work burnout?
By Preston Bottger |
November 8, 2010, Monday
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OF course, you need a vacation! Take one every day, every week, every year.
If you're skillful, you might be able to develop a "workable-mix-over-the-many-decades," but for those of you early in your careers, a good short-term balance is rarely possible.
The truth is that intense physical, intellectual and emotional demands imposed by high-level work simply do not permit an easy cycle between professional tasks and personal relaxation.
In juggling work relationships and relationships outside of work each can suffer from obligations imposed by the other. A little vacation time - however you can get it - might be just what you need to rejuvenate, and re-set priorities and commitments.
Observing those who have great responsibility for others' lives and others' money, we see many instances of burnout. Burnout, a buzz word for work-induced fatigue and depression, usually includes reduced attention span, irritability and the increasingly strange choices of priorities.
If a vacation could avoid all of this, wouldn't it be worth taking?
The biographies of happy, energetic, and useful 70 year-olds - those who made it successfully without a hint of burnout - show that these folks have worked out the essential principles of their own best rhythms of "stretch and recovery," and that they apply these religiously.
Whatever your personal formula, this is critical: you must give your mind a vacation - every day (minimum ten minutes morning and evening), every week (minimum 60 minutes of quiet time for reflection) and every year (minimum two weeks of complete disconnect from work stimuli).
(The author is Professor of Leadership and General Management at IMD)
Anand Narasimhan
THREE myths about vacation and productivity. The first myth - Beware of the employer that tells you: "Vacations are good for recharging the batteries."
Sure, if you engage in physical labor - assembling widgets, shooting hoops, or touch-typing court proceedings - a vacation will help heal joints and stave off repetitive stress injury.
But if you are reading this column, you are likely a knowledge worker. If you are paid to do things like opine why yuan revaluation will impact Arcelor-Mittal's demand forecast, then two weeks on the beach will not necessarily make you any smarter than a weekend away from the office.
The second myth - often sold by the alluring posters of Club Med - is that a vacation is an oasis of peace and quiet.
To bust this myth, you only have to turn to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's conclusion about a trip to Disneyland with the kids: "While there, we are completely aware that the hotels are overpriced, that the second-long rides have hour-long waits and that the food is truly awful." Yet, in the end, our brain fools us into reflecting on the wonderful time and forgetting about how stressful family bonding can be.
Finally, the third myth is that employers care a lot about productivity. They do, but not as much as commitment. What employers care about is knowing that you'll stay committed, regardless of whether you're at the office or on the beach.
The sociologist Mark Suchman told me of a billboard. It showed a woman lounging on a beach chair typing away on her laptop. The caption read: "In the office of the future, there will be no office." Suchman said: "While my eyes read the caption accurately, my brain offered a mischievous - but truer - reading: In the vacation of the future, there is no vacation."
(The author is Professor of Organizational Behavior at IMD.)
If you're skillful, you might be able to develop a "workable-mix-over-the-many-decades," but for those of you early in your careers, a good short-term balance is rarely possible.
The truth is that intense physical, intellectual and emotional demands imposed by high-level work simply do not permit an easy cycle between professional tasks and personal relaxation.
In juggling work relationships and relationships outside of work each can suffer from obligations imposed by the other. A little vacation time - however you can get it - might be just what you need to rejuvenate, and re-set priorities and commitments.
Observing those who have great responsibility for others' lives and others' money, we see many instances of burnout. Burnout, a buzz word for work-induced fatigue and depression, usually includes reduced attention span, irritability and the increasingly strange choices of priorities.
If a vacation could avoid all of this, wouldn't it be worth taking?
The biographies of happy, energetic, and useful 70 year-olds - those who made it successfully without a hint of burnout - show that these folks have worked out the essential principles of their own best rhythms of "stretch and recovery," and that they apply these religiously.
Whatever your personal formula, this is critical: you must give your mind a vacation - every day (minimum ten minutes morning and evening), every week (minimum 60 minutes of quiet time for reflection) and every year (minimum two weeks of complete disconnect from work stimuli).
(The author is Professor of Leadership and General Management at IMD)
Anand Narasimhan
THREE myths about vacation and productivity. The first myth - Beware of the employer that tells you: "Vacations are good for recharging the batteries."
Sure, if you engage in physical labor - assembling widgets, shooting hoops, or touch-typing court proceedings - a vacation will help heal joints and stave off repetitive stress injury.
But if you are reading this column, you are likely a knowledge worker. If you are paid to do things like opine why yuan revaluation will impact Arcelor-Mittal's demand forecast, then two weeks on the beach will not necessarily make you any smarter than a weekend away from the office.
The second myth - often sold by the alluring posters of Club Med - is that a vacation is an oasis of peace and quiet.
To bust this myth, you only have to turn to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's conclusion about a trip to Disneyland with the kids: "While there, we are completely aware that the hotels are overpriced, that the second-long rides have hour-long waits and that the food is truly awful." Yet, in the end, our brain fools us into reflecting on the wonderful time and forgetting about how stressful family bonding can be.
Finally, the third myth is that employers care a lot about productivity. They do, but not as much as commitment. What employers care about is knowing that you'll stay committed, regardless of whether you're at the office or on the beach.
The sociologist Mark Suchman told me of a billboard. It showed a woman lounging on a beach chair typing away on her laptop. The caption read: "In the office of the future, there will be no office." Suchman said: "While my eyes read the caption accurately, my brain offered a mischievous - but truer - reading: In the vacation of the future, there is no vacation."
(The author is Professor of Organizational Behavior at IMD.)
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