Take A Break Or Break Down

I’m feeling kinda rowdy today.

Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity has a great post with a slew of links on the subject of balancing one’s work and life. At issue is the fact that most American corporations, consulting and law firms, and even non-profit organizations practice a modern type of indentured servitude. And most of us American employees just settle for it thinking this is the only way to make a better living. Okay, maybe that’s stretching Arnie’s post and point a bit, but let’s consider a few things.

Are you taking a vacation this summer or at another point this year? If you’re roughly one out of three American employees, you’re making a decision to forfeit your vacation time. That’s according to a survey conducted by Expedia.com. I used to work with a woman who was allowed to rack up 225 hours of vacation time (for those of you scoring at home, that’s nearly a month). When she transferred into the department I managed, I was strongly encouraged by my own director to get her to take leave. Thinking it would be easy to get her to take two or three weeks in the slow summer months, it was more like pulling teeth. She was a support specialist and felt she was needed too much to be away even for a couple of days. She was concerned that something would fall apart and she wouldn’t be there to handle it. She felt responsible for the working group. Sound familiar? She was also so burnt out of her job that she was constantly on edge, always a whisker away from a good cry.

What she failed to realize is that her “dedication” was slowly killing her or at least robbing her of joy in life. And you could also make some arguments that there was more going on here than just wanting to be a great support staff. Make no mistake…workaholism is just as addictive, damaging, and soul-consuming as some of the other “-olisms” like alcoholism.

Here’s a challenge to you if you’re a manager or an exec…tell your people to get lost at some point this summer. If the summer is a particularly busy time of year for your organization, then make it known that each person is going to need to take some time off when it slows down. If they don’t know how to take a vacation, confiscate the Blackberry and block their access to email and voicemail. Call it “tough love” because it’s an act of love to help another person reconnect with their full life.