The Case for Vacation

Are you hesitant to take time off? Do you find yourself working while on vacation? Taking time “out of the business” is essential to personal refreshment and energy restoration. And just as important, reluctance to step away does a disservice to development of our employees and teams. In this episode, Ralph and Bill discuss the downside of the “productivity mindset,” and challenge listeners to personal reflection and to try an experiment that can increase productivity without sacrificing critical time for rejuvenation.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent Podcast, where we discuss leadership, team and organizational topics and best practices. We like to provide ideas, concepts, and pragmatic experiments to help you develop your potential in your work and leadership. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone: I’m Ralph Simone

Bill Berthel: So Ralph. We’ve got a great timely topic, I think for today.

The case for vacation, for taking vacation, the suitcase. Yeah. Well you need that too, but I think we’re gonna make a different case.

Ralph Simone: Yeah. Well, I think we’re recording this podcast during the summer when it’s not the only time to take vacation, but many families do take time off, particularly in the part of the country that we live in the northeast, because it’s beautiful up here.

Bill Berthel: Beautiful kids are off of school. If you have a teacher in the family, teachers have off too. So summertime seems to be vacation time, but to your point, there’s absolutely time in other seasons to be working. To be out of the business to take some time.

Ralph Simone: It’s amazing though. I have been surprised at why this topic keeps coming up over and over again.

You know, we were doing a session with team leaders in an organization just two weeks ago. Mm-hmm. And one of the things the person wanted to learn is how they could take a day off, not a week off. We’re making the case for, you know, PTO and vacation that goes beyond one day, but just a single day off.

Bill Berthel: They asked for that. That was the request to learn how to do that.

Ralph Simone: Yeah. And, and I said, well, first of all, you know, we’re gonna talk about work life integration. We’re gonna talk about these three buckets that we often talk about working in the business, on the business and out of the business.

And how it’s good for not only your peace and well-being but productivity to take a certain amount of time outside the business.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, absolutely. What an important question that person asked of you, right? That there’s a message behind that that suggests they’re really challenged to get away. They’re really challenged to make that work.

Ralph Simone: I, I was hard-pressed to hang in there to acknowledge and validate it because it’s so far a field from how we approach it. You know, this is our, my 32nd year in business and I have been six weeks out of the business each of those years. And you know, sometimes that’s a week of continuing education that’s not, I’m not going away all six weeks, but we operate really on a 46-week year and we value the re-energizing and the new perspectives that come from pto in time traveling and time spent outside, we value it a lot.

Bill Berthel: Absolutely. As much as we enjoy our w