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Take Your Vacation — Please!

You'll be healthier and more productive if you take time off
By Paul Lasley and Elizabeth Harryman
When we arrived in Utrecht, Netherlands, last fall, our friend Monique greeted us with a story we could hardly believe. "I just got back from five weeks of vacation that I had to take," she said. Had to take? "It's the law," she told us. "In Holland, we legally have to take five weeks of vacation a year."
We were envious. We'd managed to wrangle two vacation days around the four-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and we'd used the extended holiday to visit Holland. We'd considered ourselves lucky to get that much time off. To us, the thought of five weeks of vacation sounded as desirable — and as impossible — as a magic carpet ride.
In Europe, however, five- to six-week mandated vacations are the norm. Are these countries breeding generations of slackers? "On a productivity-per-hour basis, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, and Ireland are all as productive or more productive than we are," says Joe Robinson, author of Work to Live and a leading advocate for longer vacations. "And all these countries have at least four weeks by law of vacation time for workers."

Resources for the time-challenged
Work to Live by Joe Robinson
(Perigee Books, 2003, $14.95)
www.worktolive.info
www.timeday.org
www.workless.meetup.com

Robinson is part of a growing group of Americans who are rebelling against the high-tension, 24/7 work cycle that has become commonplace in the U.S., where employees sometimes don't take the vacation time they've earned because they're afraid of falling behind. But the benefits of vacations to both workers and employers go far beyond snapshots and souvenirs. "Studies show that when you go on vacation, your performance increases when you go back to the job," Robinson says.
And for women, vacations are essential. Marshfield Clinic in Marshfield, Wisconsin, conducted a survey of 1,500 working women, and it revealed some stunning correlations. "Women who took a vacation only once in six years were twice as likely to report high rates of tension, depression, and anxiety as women who took vacations two or more times each year," says Catherine McCarty, who led the study.
McCarty and Robinson's comments spurred us to reexamine our own practices. We're terrible about taking our vacations, and we typically work long days. We've pledged to change, and we suggest you do, too. Here are five places to start:

• Use all of your vacation days.
• Don't use your vacation days to do the laundry or paint the house, and don't check your work e-mail during your time off.
• Don't let financial concerns keep you at home during your vacation. Trips are available for every budget. Your travel agent can help you find the right one.
• Put your vacation on the calendar along with your anniversary and birthday. Don't let extra work or social obligations keep you from taking it.
• Plan your vacation at least six months in advance. You'll be more likely to take it if you plan far in advance; moreover, you can often get better hotel rates and cruise fares by booking early.

Vacations force us to relax and open our minds to fresh inspiration. Often our best ideas come to us when we least expect them — for example, when we were viewing Michelangelo's sketches at Haarlem's Teylers Museum or sitting in a cafe afterward with our Dutch friends. Come to think of it, the only trips we've ever regretted are the ones we didn't take.

This article first appeared in Westways,
the magazine of the Auto Club of Southern California.