This is me. Vacations are not relaxing. Travel is exhausting. Sleeping in a hotel bed is not restful. Running around all day packing in "new experiences" is exhausting.
To me a vacation is doing nothing. No plans. No goals. Just let the days unfold.
Sure it’s okay to take a trip and see places but it’s definitely not a must. It’s an occasional “should” just to see other parts of the world a couple of times.
People have different wants and priorities. That’s ok.
For me waiting in lines for tourist checklists is not really my thing, I am more happy sampling food and nightlife and whatnot. Everyone likes something different.
https://www.ecosa.com.au/blog/post/inemuri-the-japanese-art-...
I’d like to see the wording of this survey.
If it’s something like ‘did you use vacation time to rest?’, it seems to me that it’s likely to always have got a large percentage of ‘yes’ answers. Isn’t that partly what vacation has always been for?
> Used PTO days
> Taken a vacation
https://amerisleep.com/blog/top-cities-for-sleep-vacation/?s...
I pay no attention to anything that comes from a survey. It's meaningless.
It's just so lazy. Look at average hours which went to a high of 35 hours in 2021 (probably peak WFH), and now down to 34. This is all likely noise, but there's nothing to suggest Americans are overworked and burnt out. There are a ton of other measures, like annual hours worked, etc and none of them show an increase in the amount Americans work. Maybe people don't like their jobs, but it says more about expectations and attitude than anything else.
You hear this stuff all the time from commentators and politicians. I've heard hours worked is lower because "everyone has multiple jobs", and you look it up and it's 5% and pretty steady from the past 25 years
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
Why work if you can't even afford a house or healthy groceries for yourself or your family?
Even though inflation shot up post covid, by all official statistics wage growth has outpaced it. Therefore to imply that this behavior is as a result of people earning less in real terms is incorrect.
See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q, note the units for the chart, which indicate the figures have already been adjusted for inflation
Later when I had flexible hours I was able to sustain a middle distance relationship by working 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday and beating Friday traffic out of town to go see her.
I still think everyone in software should be working 32 hours a week. I’ve been vocal in the past about making that a four day week, but it’s the morning commute and the lunch break epiphanies that really make the 8 hour day a lie, and I worry that taking one of those day away would have a bigger negative effect on productivity than taking 1.6 hours away from every day, the first hour or so of which is emphatically a productivity/hour boost.
Productivity remained constant, there were plenty of Jira stats to back that up.
Meetings got shorter and more organized, small talk was cut down. People hustled more to get stuff finished.
There have been studies showing we only have 20-30 productive hours of knowledge work per week. Adding more hours to the work week doesn't really result in more getting done, although it can result in a project actually going backwards if tired devs start submitting buggy code at a rate faster than bugs are being fixed.
Ids say probably about every three months I leave work one day thinking I’m five hours away from solving a problem, then overnight I realize I’m doing it the hard way, delete a third of my code and I’m done in 30-60 minutes, mostly due to tests and build times. I think more and longer breaks would also help.
Is there a public source for this?
It sure made recruitment easy though. "We don't pay as well as your current job but my on call has gone off twice ever since I started here and you get 3 day weekends all summer long."
There was an article that got posted to the Seattle subreddit about how it was a bad place for AI startups because no one was willing to pull 996 to innovate, and the local reaction was to laugh whatever “thought leader” said this out of the room.
What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.
I have a feeling the problem here is more to do with reporting on a loosely worded poll than anything else though.
So any time you are spending resting is, effectively, sinful.
Most people don't put it that way these days, but the basic idea is still deeply embedded in so much of American culture.
Vacation is a normal thing: culturally, we have a strong understanding of it, and an agreement that going to visit another country, or to Disneyworld, or for a camping trip, is what you're supposed to do with paid time off.
But just resting? Well, that's just selfish!
It's the "just you know...resting" one that might be a problem. It's not the resting itself that is a problem. Everybody needs to rest. The problem is when people need to take PTO in order to get time for that rest.
Any reasonable job already includes enough time off that workers should be able to get all the rest they need without having to use up some of their PTO.
So, rest and sleep, at home, works for me.
randycupertino•4mo ago
> The survey also found that higher earners were 26 percent more likely to use PTO for sleep than those earning under $100,000. On average, Americans who took PTO for sleep used two to three days to catch up.
I feel like I could certainly use a week of PTO to catch up on sleep!! Maybe 2-3 days to relax and 3 days to do all the chores around the house I never have time for.
SoftTalker•4mo ago