Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

When I&#x27;ve been burned out or hated my job, I didn&#x27;t take vacations, because the crushing realization that I&#x27;d have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind. While on vacation, I&#x27;d start thinking about the countdown to the end of the vacation.<p>&gt; Well, root out the real causes of burnout.<p>I&#x27;ll offer the definition that&#x27;s made most sense to me. I didn&#x27;t come up with it, in fact some wise person here on HN stated it:<p>Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off.<p>You can work like a dog to release a feature, and if the feature does what it was meant to do, and you get recognized for your contribution, how hard you worked doesn&#x27;t matter as much. You are energized, excited to be part of a great team, ready to move on to the next stunning victory.<p>On the other hand, if you work like a dog on a feature and it gets cut at the last minute, or its success is undermined by some VP&#x27;s dumb idea, it sucks. If that happens over and over, without a win, you&#x27;re burned out.<p>The solution is to get a win. Work on something that you can succeed on, and succeed at it, and get rewarded for it. Could be a big thing, but even a small thing is good enough. Sounds easy, but not always even possible in a badly-run organization.

See also <i>The Onion</i>:<p>&gt; <i>Man Returns To Work After Vacation With Fresh, Reenergized Hatred For Job</i><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theonion.com&#x2F;man-returns-to-work-after-vacation-with-fresh-reenergi-1819574342" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theonion.com&#x2F;man-returns-to-work-after-vacation-...</a>

I&#x27;m burnt out right now. Layoffs, a spin-out, and huge situational challenges related to both.<p>Vacation is great, but I agree with the author here. Vacation _can_ be a tool to combat burnout - but burnout is often a result of other things besides hours worked. I&#x27;ve worked times of 80+ hours. While feeling worn out, I never got burnt out. I&#x27;ve worked times where I can barely put the effort into 30 hours&#x2F;week.<p>Right now, I&#x27;m attributing my burn out solely to the fact that we have huge amounts of &quot;keep the lights on work&quot; to complete the spin-out while continuing to deliver product. Neither the workload nor the type of work is bad. There&#x27;s just so much of it and it&#x27;s wearing.<p>----<p>For me, a vacation doesn&#x27;t solve much for me. I&#x27;ll be back to &quot;more of the same&quot;. What&#x27;s really helping is the change in pace of my work and the ability to get back to things that engage and excite me.

I had a bad case of burnout 2 years ago. I think for me it wasn’t that I was overwhelmed or otherwise overworked. I was working a lot of hours, but that didn’t bother me either. What got under my skin was that I understood the systemic reasons for all the fires we were having to put out were never going to change. So the burnout was the feeling that I was unable to do anything but tread water.

&gt; What do we do? Well, root out the real causes of burnout. If it’s not those top workplace issues, it may very well be the burn of extended, heightened stress. For employees surveyed, flexible work hours and mental health support were more popular than even a four-day work week or unlimited PTO. The point then is lots of professionals like their actual work, they just don’t like the restrictions and environment. Give direction, let them do the work. Remove barriers.<p>PTO and a healthy work environment are both good.

Burnout isn&#x27;t always caused by overwhelming jobs - dull, boring, undemanding jobs with little to do can be their own hell and spiral off into depression. Then I don&#x27;t need vacation; I need meaningful work.

I’ve been suffering from chronic fatigue which is different but I wonder if there are similarities.<p>To adjust I have dropped many responsibilities at work, halved my hours to 19 and practice pacing I.e scheduled rest, consistent level of activity day to day.<p>This has helped a lot.<p>While not everyone can go part time I wonder if scheduled breaks of even 5 minutes each hour (with no exercise, screen time or chat) would be beneficial to most people.<p>The other side I feel is companies keep inventing initiatives, kpis, okrs, goals and pushing that down the chain. Dumping more and more onto people and companies evolve from “cool” to “overly bureaucratic” over time.<p>The most stress is when you need to do X to get the job done but !X to meet some other master, maybe a beloved process. (Looking at you, scrum!)<p>It’s more stressful if when you try to negotiate out of this you are met with dogma. I tend to leave such work but I’ve seen it enough that it’s a pattern common between companies.<p>Apparently many companies think they have mastered creative process and people management and everyone else is wrong ;-).

Get rid of your Scrum&#x2F;SAFe sausage grinder, and quit thinking that adding more metrics and KPIs to an already panopticon-ish corporate environment is going to solve your productivity problems. Only then will you be able to address burnout and disgruntlement among your rank and file.<p>The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems etc.

Once again we have a CEO pretending to know what works best for the rank and file employee.<p>First we didn&#x27;t need bonuses, we just needed a pat on the back from managers and co-workers to achieve happiness.<p>Now, we don&#x27;t need vacations if we&#x27;re burnt out, instead we just need flexible hours so we can schedule our death marches around our other responsibilities and mental health resources. 10 hours is 10 hours regardless of how you schedule it. Pressure doesn&#x27;t go away just because your boss describes impending doom using nice words.<p>What&#x27;s next? Desks aren&#x27;t the answer for writing surfaces because our walls are already flat?

An extended leave did nothing but make burnout worse by coming back to the careful planning left behind to mitigate my absence being thrown out days in by a meddling manager from another team who saw the vacuum as an opportunity to take over the responsibilities permanently. Looking to exit.

I think vacations help mostly in the sense of &quot;I just need to get through the next two months&quot;. That may help as a <i>coping</i> mechanism for burnout, but doesn&#x27;t stop it.<p>And of course if you have a job that perpetuates cyclical or chronic burnout, going on vacation just means that you come back to work even more buried in things that went undone.<p>Or you sacrifice having a true vacation and still commit to working part of the time you&#x27;re away.

&quot;8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will!&quot; - union slogan, 1920s.<p>&quot;Unions. The people who brought you the weekend&quot;.

Not only is it not the answer, vacation can actually be a contributor to burnout, IME.<p>In my current role, taking PTO is a legitimate <i>punishment</i>. If I take a day off, there is nobody else on my team who has capacity to pick up my work in my absence. When I return from PTO, not only do I now have double the amount of work to catch up on, but I also have 15 emails from angry managers upset that I didn&#x27;t get to their request sooner.<p>&quot;you should just take some vacation&quot; is often a convenient escape hatch for managers that want to seem like they&#x27;re helping, but without actually putting any effort into solving the problems that make people want to escape from work in the first place.

Bullshit. Vacation [1] IS the answer for burnout. Long vacations are even more ok for burnout. Sabbaticals are the most ok. Guess what a doctor would recommend you do if you&#x27;re having health issues from burnout?<p>If there&#x27;s chronic burnout in your company&#x2F;org then indeed, no amount of vacation will fix that. But neither would flexible work hours or mental health support.<p>[1] Vacation means complete and total disconnect from work or work related activities. That goes beyond not checking work emails. I&#x27;m talking no leetcode or learning some new JS framework.

While I agree with the title, the article itself is a fluff piece. It takes several paragraphs just to give hand wavy advice like, &quot;Just remove barriers.&quot; It also feels like it can&#x27;t possibly be true that people prefer flexible hours <i>more</i> than a four day work week as is claimed. This just feels like one startup guru trying to kid themself into thinking they can get away with avoiding substantive change and trying to justify their fee by dutifully parroting what they heard at the latest growth seminar.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;4dayweek.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;4dayweek.io</a> and during the time I spent researching companies, it blew my mind how awful the vacation policy is in some companies (especially the US)<p>i.e. 10 days vacation shouldn&#x27;t be celebrated as a benefit.<p>Vacation isn&#x27;t everything though; there have been some studies which show the positive effect of a vacation quickly disappears when work resumes.<p>What we really need (imo) is a shorter, more focused work week (with less fluff + meetings) i.e. a 4 day work week

I think burnout is mostly related to a lack of intrinsic motivation &#x2F; reward. When you&#x27;re no longer deeply interested in what you&#x27;re doing, it feels like a grind whether its 30 hours a week or 80.

Vacation is when I want to complete ambitious projects that are not work related. My vacations are exhausting but worthwhile. They are like parenting. They do nothing to help burnout unless I spend them on doing nothing. How does one avoid burnout? 4 day work week. Have a day off with no kids and no travel and no work. Forced recovery time. Like sleep.

I would bet that flexible work hours are contributing for higher employee burnout.

At my last job I took a 20% cut in pay to get a 4 day workweek. Every Thursday evening became “Yay! Three day weekend!”

I think it depends how long the vacation? A month long vacation for me always helps when I find myself becoming overly negative.<p>Edit* Should add, a lot has to do with your attitude. Some things won’t change and fighting then just makes you look like a jerk in the office. Either come to peace with it or find another job. Of course after you have reasonably done what you think you can to make a difference.<p>Many jobs are brainless 9to5 collect a paycheck do bare minimum and this is ok for a lot of people, they find creativity and joy elsewhere.

unless the entire team&#x2F;company takes vacation at the same time, it is not too helpful.<p>the person comes back to a ton of work waiting for him.<p>also, when others take vacation, the work pace often does not stop, and the person, who himself is going through a burnout phase, takes on even more load

Time away from work absolutely is important for recovering from burnout. If work is causing burnout, prevention means adjusting the parts of work that cause burnout.

I hate vacation.<p>Stressful travel, no real downtime, spending money like there&#x27;s no tomorrow.

Burnout for me was too much responsibility. I would cope with the workload stress better over time due to efficency but the responsibility stress is still there and the more efficient you are the more responsibility you take on due to productivity.

My solution to burn out was to go down to part-time; I have been incredibly fortunate that my work place supported my decision to go down to 4 days a week, with the option to do 3 days for 3-6 months and keep my full pay - I was not expecting this.

This is not much different than the fact that oversleeping during the weekend does not help with the sleep deprivation during the past week... or weeks. One needs to rest. Every. Day.

It is not the answer, but definitely part of the answer. When I have to work twice as hard before and after vacation, to make up for it, well, that&#x27;s pretty damn exhausting.

Does preventing burn out come down to being paid (in cash&#x2F;RSU&#x27;s&#x2F;etc) for the productive output of others ? If you are the one generating productive surplus for others, doesn&#x27;t it become hard to justify the longer it goes on.<p>I do not understand how people can write in their resume that they helped their company generate $100 million revenue per year, while being paid &lt; 1 million per year and not feel like they were taken for a ride.

The issue is also people bringing their work to vacation. This lowers the effectiveness of vacations.

I don&#x27;t want &quot;mental health support&quot; from work. I only need that if my workplace is causing serious mental health issues in the first place. (Which it is at present.)