Getting Away From Your Job For A Vacation
by Tim Larison
Before I was a travel agent, I worked 22 years in the telecommunications industry as a software engineer. In my previous career I often came across co-workers who would never take a vacation. One person I knew got this feedback on his year end performance review: “You’ve got to start taking time off. You have two months of vacation saved up!”
Who was this person who never seemed to take a break from the job? Me!
While this may seem hard to believe when you read of my family’s travel adventures in recent years, it was indeed the case. For me what really changed the way we vacationed was buying into the Disney Vacation Club (DVC). With DVC we had so many vacation “points” to use each year, which forced me to start scheduling vacations months in advance.
Skipping vacations because of work is common in today’s workplace. In a recent story in the Denver Post 57% of small business owners say they are taking one week vacation this summer, down from an average of 67% last year. Alice Bredin from American Express Small Business Monitor says in the story “The double-edged sword of running a small business is that when you’re not busy, you worry about going away, but when you’re really busy and you’re in better financial position to get away, it’s even harder to get out.”
If you are one not to take a vacation because of work, I encourage you to schedule one soon. What helped me was to take out the calendar and mark off a week or two far in advance for a vacation, schedule our DVC stay for that time, and tell my employer “I’m taking off these weeks, no matter what!” Now as a small business owner I do the same thing – we schedule our trips months in advance. Business issues have a way of coming up right before or during a vacation, but we don’t let that stop us from getting away.
Our trips have allowed us to return to work refreshed and re-energized, and have drawn us closer as a family (that’s Anne and the boys – left – relaxing in our DVC one bedroom villa during a 1999 vacation). And in the end is there any work issue more important than that?