You know that last day before you leave on vacation? Those last hours when you’re crunchin’ on a double work pile, trying to get everything finished, but your brain is already splashing in the surf? As the Eagles song says, you’re “al-l-l-l-ready gone!” But, sorry, you’re not.
Whether that last day finds you slumped or pumped, the pre-vacation mentality remains a workplace conundrum that’s more intense than ever.
“You’re already kind of checked out, you’re daydreaming about what you’re going to do, you can’t wait to shuck off the work and the stress. The weather’s nice, a breeze is blowing through your hair – how do you work with that image in your mind?” says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a Chicago-based outplacement consulting firm.
Challenger attributes that dawdling last day, in part, to the mind-set and emotions hard-wired in us throughout our early life.
“As you get closer, it is like a mini adult version of that last week of school heading into summer vacation,” he says, his voice growing dreamier at the thought.
Besides racing to finish unfinished business at work, pre-vacationers are consumed with other countdown craziness. Water the plants. Feed the fish. Clean the house. Turn on the out-of-office reply message. Stop the mail and newspaper. Set the light timers. Lose weight. Pack the bags.
“We found that what happens is in the week leading up to the vacation, stress increases. You feel stress to a high point until you get to the trip itself,” says John Lounsbury, a University of Tennessee psychology professor.
“There’s the pre-vacation expectations, the general hassle and the anxiety of getting ready.”
And then, ahhhh! Lounsbury says the actual vacation drops stress levels while increasing “life-satisfaction” measures.
“Things in corporate America have become a whole lot more stressful – the job security, the efficiency expected, the more hours,” says psychologist Paul Baard, who teaches communications at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business.
“And here you are, accumulatively tired from the previous 50 weeks. So all this stuff adds to anxiety.” The solution, says Baard, is to be 100 percent where you are.
“If you’re at work, be focused on work,” he says. “Having one foot at work and one foot on vacation is counterproductive. And that includes not thinking about work when you are on vacation.”
