I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over?
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.
> 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?
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.
I don't think it's strange to enjoy some time off at home, but also think it's bothersome for it to commonly be a "do we rest or have a vacation this year" kind of situation from the other extreme.
I have a feeling the problem here is more to do with reporting on a loosely worded poll than anything else though.
I don't know if I see the expectation part of it. A common reply, at least around me, to "what are your plans?" is "enjoying family time" or "just catching up on things" and that's met with some appreciative remark. However, in companies/neighborhoods with more wealthier and type A people, I could see relaxing seeming strange.
No, that's probably true. That's where the last part of my post applies: this is rarely a conscious application of the Protestant work ethic, and more just the way it has shaped our culture to say that rest for rest's sake, and especially taking time off from work just for that, is Wrong. Specifically, it's Lazy.
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.
An Amerisleep.com survey of more than 1,200 Americans revealed that 37 percent used vacation days in the past year just to rest.
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?
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
The erosion of the spending value of the dollar (aka the amount of inflation from post-covid government spending), and therefore most people's salaries probably have more effect on people's feelings about their salary and how far it's not going, which in turn negatively impacts feelings about work and overall stress.
Why work if you can't even afford a house or healthy groceries for yourself or your family?
>The erosion of the spending value of the dollar (aka the amount of inflation from post-covid government spending), and therefore most people's salaries probably have more effect on people's feelings about their salary and how far it's not going, which in turn negatively impacts feelings about work and overall stress.
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.
People are getting fired and are having to rely on gig work to live. It's a reporting gimmick by both administrations to convince us the economy is doing better when it hasn't.
I think maybe they mean something like "questionnaire poll survey" vs "data reporting survey" (i.e. the former comes from asking random people a hopefully well phrased question and seeing who responds, the latter comes from many businesses just feeding payroll data up to the government to be analysed directly), but even then... a good questionnaire poll is nothing to ignore.
When I was a hot shit young programmer being underpaid, I tried several times to negotiate a shorter work week in lieu of more money. My theory was either Friday afternoon or better Monday morning so I could sleep in a bit after the weekend. Until recently I was a night owl. And the problem with trying to take a trip out of town on the weekend is that if your flight is delayed or you just want to save money, it’s much easier to guarantee you’re home by 9 am on Monday than by 11pm on Sunday night. If anything goes wrong with your transportation you end up with a more stressful Monday.
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.
HBO Max (pre merger) had a 32hr work week in the summer. (Not sure about now).
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.
I’ve gotten a better sense of when I’m grinding gears in the afternoon but if you’re really focused on a vexing problem it can be tricky to check in with yourself.
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.
Sadly no, they missed a great chance to do some PR blog posting.
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."
> The new report found that one-third of workers aren’t spending their vacation on leisure because they’re using it to recover from exhaustion. That rate was highest among millennials, at 43 percent, followed by 34 percent of Gen X, 33 percent of Gen Z and just 20 percent of baby boomers.
> 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.
Yeah I've actaully tried that but the chores part doesn't happen. The only way I get chores done is to just do them a little bit every day. Chores accumulate a little bit at a time and they are best managed the same way so that they don't pile up and start looking insurmountable.
> Some people feel like their vacations are more work than the actual vacation was supposed to be
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.
Yeah I do not get this mentality at all. So many people in beautiful locations seem obsessed with just recording the experience, and maximizing the number of things recorded, than actually living it. And of course the reality is that those images/videos will just get posted on social media and then forgotten forever, maybe shown to a friend every once in a blue moon. It's not like somebody's going to look at his half assed video of a waterfall months later and be like 'ahhhh - relaxing.'
It seems like people felt it was an obligation to “go somewhere” when taking time off. Like it was an expectation.
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.
I find seeing other parts of the world to be vastly overrated. It is sometimes good to get away from your normal locale just to disconnect from it if that improves your ability to relax. But seeing the Great Wall or the Louvre.... not compelling to me.
I think that with travel, you really have to focus on what you would like to do, and everything else is really secondary.
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.
The time off doesn't come with a mandate to go somewhere else - it's just time off from work. If I went somewhere, I'd be just as tired as if I didn't; it would just be a different kind of tired.
People don’t post on mundane things in general, and HN in particular is a hub for side hustle content.
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.
I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over?
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.
> 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?
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.
I don't think it's strange to enjoy some time off at home, but also think it's bothersome for it to commonly be a "do we rest or have a vacation this year" kind of situation from the other extreme.
I have a feeling the problem here is more to do with reporting on a loosely worded poll than anything else though.
I don't know if I see the expectation part of it. A common reply, at least around me, to "what are your plans?" is "enjoying family time" or "just catching up on things" and that's met with some appreciative remark. However, in companies/neighborhoods with more wealthier and type A people, I could see relaxing seeming strange.
The major root of this is the Protestant work ethic, which leads very directly to the idea that your only value on this earth is the work that you do.
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.
I don't think vacation would be considered work under the Protestant work ethic even if it requires effort to plan?
No, that's probably true. That's where the last part of my post applies: this is rarely a conscious application of the Protestant work ethic, and more just the way it has shaped our culture to say that rest for rest's sake, and especially taking time off from work just for that, is Wrong. Specifically, it's Lazy.
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!
An Amerisleep.com survey of more than 1,200 Americans revealed that 37 percent used vacation days in the past year just to rest.
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?
> Have you done the following in the past 12 months just to catch up on sleep?
> 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-...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
The erosion of the spending value of the dollar (aka the amount of inflation from post-covid government spending), and therefore most people's salaries probably have more effect on people's feelings about their salary and how far it's not going, which in turn negatively impacts feelings about work and overall stress.
Why work if you can't even afford a house or healthy groceries for yourself or your family?
>The erosion of the spending value of the dollar (aka the amount of inflation from post-covid government spending), and therefore most people's salaries probably have more effect on people's feelings about their salary and how far it's not going, which in turn negatively impacts feelings about work and overall stress.
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
People are getting fired and are having to rely on gig work to live. It's a reporting gimmick by both administrations to convince us the economy is doing better when it hasn't.
Uh, isn’t your first link from a survey?
I think maybe they mean something like "questionnaire poll survey" vs "data reporting survey" (i.e. the former comes from asking random people a hopefully well phrased question and seeing who responds, the latter comes from many businesses just feeding payroll data up to the government to be analysed directly), but even then... a good questionnaire poll is nothing to ignore.
If you have kids, PTO staycation is the only escape.
When I was a hot shit young programmer being underpaid, I tried several times to negotiate a shorter work week in lieu of more money. My theory was either Friday afternoon or better Monday morning so I could sleep in a bit after the weekend. Until recently I was a night owl. And the problem with trying to take a trip out of town on the weekend is that if your flight is delayed or you just want to save money, it’s much easier to guarantee you’re home by 9 am on Monday than by 11pm on Sunday night. If anything goes wrong with your transportation you end up with a more stressful Monday.
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.
HBO Max (pre merger) had a 32hr work week in the summer. (Not sure about now).
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.
I’ve gotten a better sense of when I’m grinding gears in the afternoon but if you’re really focused on a vexing problem it can be tricky to check in with yourself.
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.
>Productivity remained constant, there were plenty of Jira stats to back that up.
Is there a public source for this?
Sadly no, they missed a great chance to do some PR blog posting.
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."
This “article” is covering the survey from a mattress company. I wouldn’t take this very seriously.
> The new report found that one-third of workers aren’t spending their vacation on leisure because they’re using it to recover from exhaustion. That rate was highest among millennials, at 43 percent, followed by 34 percent of Gen X, 33 percent of Gen Z and just 20 percent of baby boomers.
> 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.
Yeah I've actaully tried that but the chores part doesn't happen. The only way I get chores done is to just do them a little bit every day. Chores accumulate a little bit at a time and they are best managed the same way so that they don't pile up and start looking insurmountable.
> Some people feel like their vacations are more work than the actual vacation was supposed to be
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.
Yeah I do not get this mentality at all. So many people in beautiful locations seem obsessed with just recording the experience, and maximizing the number of things recorded, than actually living it. And of course the reality is that those images/videos will just get posted on social media and then forgotten forever, maybe shown to a friend every once in a blue moon. It's not like somebody's going to look at his half assed video of a waterfall months later and be like 'ahhhh - relaxing.'
It seems like people felt it was an obligation to “go somewhere” when taking time off. Like it was an expectation.
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.
I find seeing other parts of the world to be vastly overrated. It is sometimes good to get away from your normal locale just to disconnect from it if that improves your ability to relax. But seeing the Great Wall or the Louvre.... not compelling to me.
I think that with travel, you really have to focus on what you would like to do, and everything else is really secondary.
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.
On the other hand, it is my reason for living. I work to be able to travel.
People have different wants and priorities. That’s ok.
If you don't go somewhere else, particularly out of cellphone range, you're at risk of being called about work.
then don't answer your phone when you're not on the clock
I would use a sick day to rest, not PTO.
PTO usually refers to a system where vacation time and sick time are combined into one allocation.
An alternative: Inemuri (just sleep at work)
https://www.ecosa.com.au/blog/post/inemuri-the-japanese-art-...
Unlimited PTO = never waking up?
One doesn't need unlimited PTO to be dead.
The time off doesn't come with a mandate to go somewhere else - it's just time off from work. If I went somewhere, I'd be just as tired as if I didn't; it would just be a different kind of tired.
So, rest and sleep, at home, works for me.
Somehow I expected "Americans are using PTO for side hustles" but this is probably just me speaking from within my HN bubble.
People don’t post on mundane things in general, and HN in particular is a hub for side hustle content.
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.