All work, no play:
Some employees still reluctant to take advantage of time off
Ryan Smith says he can’t remember how many vacation days he’s left on the table over the course of his career. “In the first 15 years of me working, I left at least a week out there whether it was personal days or vacation days,” says Smith, a 42-year-old graphic designer in Chicago. “I couldn’t even tell you why.”
Smith says it wasn’t because he felt guilty about taking time off or that he was especially busy at work. Instead, he thinks it was just malaise. “It sounds nuts to me now but sometimes you just get into this habit where you get up and you go to work and then you do stuff on the weekends and that’s it,” Smith says. “Then Monday comes and you get up and you go to work and unless you have someone in your life who is sort of pushing you toward taking time off, you don’t really think about it.”
Smith says it was easier for him to avoid vacation when he was younger — or at least that’s what he told himself — because he was single and didn’t have children. Now, he realizes those thoughts were misguided. “I’d see my friends doing all these great things on Instagram, people who are either single or who are divorced or even couples or even families and I think about how much time I wasted sitting at the office basically doing nothing when I could have just gone on road trips up and down the East Coast or flown out to Europe or just done something much cooler than staring at my screen,” he says.
While Smith regrets his reluctance to take time off, he’s hardly alone. Each year, employees across the country don’t take all the days coming to them because they either don’t want to take the time off or they don’t really think they need the time to themselves. “It’s hard to convince someone they should take time off, which is hard to comprehend for some of us,” says Dean Blakely, a social worker in Philadelphia who specializes in employee relationships.
Blakely says a lot of people have a hard time believing they’ll get more out of personal days than days spent at work. “You do yourself an incredible amount of good when you take some time to yourself and step away from your daily grind and actually focus on things that interest you, focus on things that interest others or focus on absolutely nothing,” Blakely says.
Of course, if you think that all you’ll be doing during your time off is sitting in front of the TV catching up on “Below Deck,” then you probably see no reason to take time off. But instead of thinking of the mundane and routine, which people often consider to be the most relaxing time they can spend away from the workplace, Blakely suggests thinking of something that enriches your soul. “At the risk of sounding all hippy-dippy, there is a definite benefit to taking care of yourself,” he says. “If you can step away for even a short amount of time and look inward and focus on some of the small things that could help you in the short term, you’re going to find out that the small things turn into big things and they can be a major benefit to your life.”
Tara Bryant says in the past, she was reluctant to take time off at the end of the year because the days were pretty stress-free. “There’s not a better time to work at the office than December, or at least that’s what I thought,” says the
31-year-old financial planner from Springfield, Illinois. “But the reason that’s true is that there’s not a lot of work to do. So here I was, for years, not taking time off because I liked working when there was no real work to do. And then my husband was like ‘you know, if you’re not going to do
any real work, let’s get out of town,’ so the next year, we
did.”
A few years ago, Smith says he decided to take up fishing after a bike accident on Chicago’s lakefront. “I went through a summer where I was really into riding my bike and I thought I would do these biking trips and actually take time off and I got really excited about it but then I blew out my knee and that was pretty much the end of that,” he says.
“While I was recovering, I started fishing off the pier at Montrose Beach because that always looked so cool to me when I biked by — and I knew nothing about fishing. But I read up on it and talked to a lot of people and I got really into it. I started taking drives out to lakes in Wisconsin and the next thing you know, I was completely hooked — pun intended.”
So much so that Smith says he’s ready for a six-day ice fishing trip up in Minnesota between now and early next year. “Of course, I’m not going to be sitting on the ice for six straight days but I will spend plenty of time catching fish, or at least trying to catch fish,” he says. “I’m going with a group and there are other things for us to do and
there’s a ton of comradery and I have a great time.”