Vacationing Can Really Mean Something!

As summer passes, we're reminded how important vacations are. In part, it's about happiness. There are certain abilities we need to be happy: and they're falling into disuse. You can relearn them on vacation.

For instance, the ability to sit and do nothing! Watch the waves, the sun go down. This experience of deep absorbtion is what allows us to feel deeply.

Another neglected ability is the ability to be leisurely: to take your time, to notice, to appreciate. In particular, this is important for relationships, and good relationships are at the heart of happiness. You can't have good relationships if you're harried and distracted.

And finally, the ability to reflect: to take stock of your life and ask if you're living the way you want. This is something we usually do on vacations, and may neglect if we never escape.

So you can revive these basic abilities when you go on vacation.

Time to Declare E-Mail Bankruptcy?

When I give talks on my book, Slow is Beautiful, I ask people what their time issues are. More and more people say it’s email. Finally, a way to deal with it has emerged: Send out a message telling everyone that you’re declaring e-mail bankruptcy and that you’re starting over anew.

I’ve also thought of leaving on my “out of office” message all the time. That way, no one expects an answer very soon, and as time passes, they’ll forget they ever sent you a message.

The polite thing might be to have an auto-response that says, “ I’m overwhelmed with email. Please accept my apology for not replying in a timely fashion.”

As a Washington Post article indicates, really important people are starting to get out of email altogether. Maybe not having email will be the new status indicator and everyone will follow suit and the problem will be solved!

Hi, I'm Joan and I'm a Workaholic

What do we do about our extreme working hours? Everything suffers: our health, our relationships, our civic engagement, our creativity, and even, eventually, the workplace. Americans have much worse health that Europeans and that brings absenteeism, turnover, and more mistakes to our workplaces. And what happens to kids?

How can Americans learn to think in terms of the long run instead of short term results?
Some of the people working 16 hour days claim they love it. But how long can they keep it up before they fall apart?

We need policies that give people shorter work hours, but this won’t happen until people demand it. Americans still don’t realize how important it is to have balance in life. We need a movement for a healthier work place. The Take Back Your Time movement is working for this.

Some people are starting to understand and have joined “workaholics anonymous.” Maybe the only way we can change is to join with others and tell our stories and to begin to gain strength from each other.

Working Too Many Hours: Flexibility Needed

The root of the problem of our time crisis is the workplace. We work too many hours. In the past, we got people’s attention when we told them that we work nine weeks more than the average European. But now that example isn’t going to work as well. Even though there is much evidence that the French 35-hour work week is successful by many criteria, the French have a new leader who opposes it. Maybe we should talk about “flexibility” in the workplace. A story posted on Tom Paine makes such a suggestion and presents a good argument.

"Workplace flexibility is about innovations in how work gets done. It includes flexibility in the scheduling of full-time hours, flexibility in the number of hours worked and the location of work, career flexibility with multiple points for exit and re-entry into the work force and the flexibility to address unexpected and ongoing personal and family needs.

"The implementation of flexible workplaces can be achieved without sacrificing employers' strategic business and organizational objectives. It does not have to mean businesses suffer. In fact, groups from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Corporate Voices for Working Families maintain that flexible workplace arrangements can help businesses recruit and retain employees."

Many professionals already have some flexibility, although not often in the length of working weeks. But so many people think we can’t have laws that give us a longer vacation or a shorter work day, that talking about flexibility might be the foot in the door.