In the 1985 blockbuster movie, Ghostbusters, three Columbia University professors are fired for their paranormal-focused research about their first encounter with a ghost. It turns out ghosts were prevalent. With that, these professors found their new purpose in life eradicating ghosts.
Fast forward to today, we don’t have a ghost problem in our society, we have a burnout problem. Burnout is everywhere and it has to be eradicated. Society tells us that vacations are the solution. But it’s not and even if it was, we are quite bad at taking vacations.
USA Today came out with an article 2 weeks ago (June of 2024) highlighting the fact that Americans are the worst at taking vacation time. WORLDWIDE! On average, Americans take 11 days off per year. 78% of all workers leave PTO on the table.
85% of workers, according to a recent Harris Poll. wish that their workplace culture would change when it comes to vacationing.
CNBC just recently exposed the growth of quiet vacationing.
The main point in all of this data, points back to the pressure of being productive and to not look like slackers. So, we ghost while we’re “on the clock”!
It’s easy to say that American work ethic is what makes us great. But it’s also easy to say this is what makes us burn out.
Either or, the rise of burnout is much bigger than a work-rest ratio problem. Burnout is an achievement culture problem that has been brewing for over 50 years.
Though vocational and emotional burnout was a term that dates back to the 1970s, it wasn’t until 2019 that the World Health Organization acknowledged that there was an epidemic happening. One year later, the pandemic magnified our burnout tendencies and with that, the Great Resignation was born.
I was one of them.
Burnout at its core is an emotional disconnection of our efforts.
This disconnect can be attributed to many things. Identity crisis, lack of recognition, shift in values, or just a toxic workplace. But the biggest attribute of this disconnect is not knowing our purpose. I often say, that when we know our why, we know our way.
But the way forward is not about achievement or out of burnout, our way ahead is about using our purpose for service.
What the achievement culture takes pride in the most is its unique ability to make us feel empty and unsatisfied. We never say, “This is enough“. We are obsessed with breaking records. We are fascinated with the words more, growth, and scaling. Achieving more has no ceiling as we fulfill our fullest potential. Hence the terms hamster wheel and treadmill that are frequently used when we refer to our pursuits of success.
Because of the competitive nature of the achievement culture, we have forgotten how to rest. How to recharge. How to reset. We have forgotten that there is beauty in boundaries! “Enough, I’ve hit my capacity“. Our boundary mechanisms have crashed and burned!
Working hard is so important, but there is a word called BALANCE to keep us regulated, healthy, and available to those who need us the most…FAMILY.
I unapologetically endorse long vacations (more on that shortly), but I will be the first to say that vacations don’t cure our burnout. It’s just a Band-Aid best used by our achievement culture. The cure to burnout starts when we flip the meaning of achievement on its head and then take active steps towards realigning our priorities to our purpose.
Once we master this, we can improve our vacation habits!
Ghost Busting Achievement
Achieving is great, but let’s take a look at where we can fall into its traps.
Achievement by the world standards has a specific look and feel. And depending on where we have set our gazes or have been indoctrinated by our past experiences, success will look different for everyone. If we aren’t careful, the success of others becomes our own goals.
Be careful of comparison traps! It’s a thief of joy!
The societal measures of achievement are earning paper certificates, performing well academically, getting the good paying job, getting married, climbing the ladder, buying the house with the picket fence, and raising good kids who are introduced to an unlimited amount of activities, putting kids through college, and then saving up for retirement and living comfortably in our golden years once we have an empty nest.
This is not bad as this is our American Script (Dream) for all citizens. Many people come to this country to find this type of freedom. But life rarely fulfills what the Rat Race promises.
Life is up and down, left and right, and filled with trials at every intersection. In life, we will achieve, and we will fail at many things. We all have or will hit a point of adversity and will question everything we believe. This is a blessing, by the way, to be able to reevaluate our personal belief systems when burnout happens. It’s imperative we use these evaluations to realign our core values.
But what’s interesting is observing how so many of us are just as sad when we are at the highest peak as we are in the lowest valley. This is troublesome! This should be troublesome to all of us. Burnout happens because we’ve been sold the wrong definition of how to find our joy. It’s not in the “stuff” or “experiences” or “vacations.”
The secret to sustainable happiness is hidden in our purpose.
When we know how and why we were designed, the “outcomes” of our ambitions, whatever that is, do NOT matter. Timelines don’t matter. The size of the house doesn’t matter. The size of our retirement account doesn’t matter. The titles before and after our names don’t matter. The number of achievements we accomplish doesn’t matter. What universities our kids go to, will not matter.
What matters?
Loving God and people.
To do this well, we must live in alignment with our core purpose! We all have a uniquely designed blueprint for how we show up in this world! What’s yours? When was the last time you asked yourself this question?
Work will never feel like punishment when we are operating in our purpose the way that God has uniquely designed each one of us to work. How we show up in our work is insanely different for every single person on this earth! The ability to take our purpose to serve others, in only the way that makes sense to each one of us, becomes part of something greater and creates so much good for this world.
We must stop hiding behind the facade of other people’s perceived thoughts, and our inner critics, and be authentic to who we are at the core. I can’t say this enough, it matters more to focus on our “how” than our “what”. What we do matters, but how we do it matters more.
Purpose is the cure for burnout.
This is the cure to eliminating stress. This is the cure to sustainable joy. This is the cure for seeing the world differently.
The ancient proverb holds true, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life“. My reframe of this proverb would be: Find your purpose, release expectations of your efforts, and you will find relief from burnout.
So if you’ll never work a day in your life after you dedicate a life to what you love, are vacations necessary? The short answer is YES, vacations are still necessary. We can still get tired, overwhelmed, and fatigued by our passions. But let’s not confuse fatigue with burnout. In fact, if “how we show up” is the goal instead of “what we are doing” for more achievements, we can now ease the guilt of taking more than 11 days off per year!
So let’s back to the topic of taking time off…
Ghost Busting Norms
Ghosting is something my wife tells me I do excellently. I’m an introvert, so when I’m in crowded environments or parties, I just disappear without announcements. No “goodbyes”, “see you laters”, “thank you for having me”…I just find the nearest door and poof.
I just GHOSTED!
I highly recommend not using the ghosting technique for taking vacations so you can truly unplug versus pretending to be plugged in. Follow your HR guidelines. If you’re self-employed, notify any partners/clients that you are truly ghosting (with an announcement). This permission to ghost is to not be irresponsible. Ghost politely. Hand things over. Finish the major project and put a line in the sand if another project is preventing you from taking off.
As summer is in full gear, we have some decisions to make regarding vacations. Here are 7 categories of how we all approach vacations.
- Some of us have some time saved up to take off, but big projects, events, and launches are getting in the way.
- Some of us have allocated our PTO to later in the year, which is great if we stick to it.
- Some of us, have little PTO and need more time to take care of ourselves or unique challenges in our life.
- Some of us are independent and we set our own time off, but the research says that most freelancers rarely take time off.
- Some of us simply don’t have anybody to hand over our work to when we do take off. So we avoid vacationing.
- Some of us are overly ambitious and our goals don’t allow time to rest….that’s what we do when we die right?
- But the TOP reason we are only using half of our PTO is because of GUILT. It’s because our colleagues next to us (virtually or in person) are not using their time off is the reason we’re not taking off. Someone else’s inability to create healthy boundaries typically impacts our own inability to get time away. This is the underbelly of the achievement culture.
This reason alone gives all of us permission to ghost. We must do our own self-assessment of what type of rest works. We must find our own pace. We must realize that if we disappear for more than 11 days does not make us a slacker. We must not get tricked into thinking that the world is going to stop spinning when we disappear to recharge.
Ghosting Off The Clock
The number one culprit preventing healthy vacations is our devices. Without healthy boundaries, technology keeps us not only from doing our best work, it prevents us from doing our best rest!
To do vacations well, follow these 3 tips:
- Remove your email application and social applications from your phone on DAY 1 of your vacation.
- Leave the computer at home to prevent any temptations to sneak a peek at your email.
- Keep your last day before PTO and the first day after PTO meeting-free so you can re-engage with the workload on your terms. This one act of meeting free days pre/post vacations reduces stress and helps to ease you back into rhythm.
If you need proof that your device may need a vacation too, take a moment to listen for your alerts. Pause right here and sit in 2 minutes of silence. Seriously!
Was it an email? Was it a text? Was it a chat? Was it the news? Was it a weather alert? Amber alert? Was it a phone call? Was it all of the above? If it’s still silence, congratulations, you’re 1 percent of the world experiencing a moment of silence right now. Now imagine a couple of weeks of this same type of silence.
Our world is noisier than ever. I’m part of that same noise and I encourage you to unplug from me as well if you’re going to do a digital detox or attempt a digital-free vacation. We need permission to detox, recharge, and vacation like a champ!
This is your permission to ghost!
Ghosting On The Clock
Ghosting techniques go beyond vacations and no, this isn’t about taking a quiet vacation. If you’re a 40-hour-a-week employee…own how to work well within your allotted time. Implement the same strategies for ghosting on vacation for ghosting after 5:00. And no, ghosting after 5:00 is not quiet quitting either! You’re holding boundaries for other areas that you find valuable in your life. Technology has slowly crept into our “off hours” and we must debunk the norms of being accessible around the clock. Remember that the most important organization is the family.
Some jobs and industries require being on call after hours and there is no way around it. But for everyone else who have options, crossing the no-no boundary line is a result of the culture. We meet way too much and put too much on our plates, and because of that, we can’t work or respond to emails until after 5:00. This may work for seasons but is not healthy when this is the way of life.
But I’m going to digress on this topic and point you to a few resources if this is a challenge in your workplace.
1. 7 WFH Boundaries You Must Know
3. A Letter to Zoom and Friends
4. Normalize Sabbaticals, Beat Burnout
Ghosting As A Way of Life
When we are convinced that we have to earn a sabbatical, this brings us back full circle to the underbelly of the achievement culture. Tenure is great, but we all have the right to rest well on our terms.
Extended ghosting, sabbaticals, or whatever you want to label it is something that I highly endorse. Sabbaticals should be a norm in our country and we can easily take notes from our European friends. They don’t call it sabbaticals, but the French, Italians, and other European countries, shut down every August. The mandatory shutdowns work! Morale stays up and turnover is reduced with radical initiatives that focus on the health and values of the worker.
Four consecutive weeks off in a row (on top of earned vacation time) is just simply unheard of as a standard in America. But it doesn’t have to be. We don’t really need permission from institutions for the rest we need. But as individuals, we are in a day and age where we can make this happen. If you’re a leader of a company, you can also make this happen for your team. Before we make excuses for all the reasons this isn’t possible, let me remind you that our society got quite creative literally overnight when the pandemic hit.
Unfortunately, we are still dealing with the crisis of our era and it’s called burnout. Burnout can be solved if we shift our motivations from more accomplishment to more purpose. Meanwhile, vacationing isn’t the only way to catch a break. Below are just a few tested and tried techniques by organizations that are getting it right.
A Few Tactics for Promoting Rest
- Summer Fridays – Shut down early, go remote only, or mandate no meetings.
- Summer and Winter Break – Shut down for a full week during the 4th of July and the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years
- 4-Day Work Weeks – Implement 4-Day Work Weeks throughout the year
- Anti-Quiet Vacationing Policies – Allow ghosting so workers don’t have to pretend to be on the clock.
- Comp Days – This is a classic tip, but reward workers for hard work, excellence, and getting projects over the finish line.
- Communication Boundaries with Work – No emails after 5:00 PM or before 9:00 AM
- Communication Boundaries with Family – When vacationing with family, communicate and negotiate what everyone needs for their rest. Everyone has a different mode for recharging the battery.
So here are a few reflective questions to think about:
- Is my work aligned with my purpose or aligned with a different objective?
- What goals do I have and why is it important that I reach those goals?
- When was the last time I had an extended vacation? OR when did I actually take a vacation?
- What is the worst thing that would happen if I ghosted while on vacation (no phones or computers)?
- As a leader or business owner, what if I shut down my company for a couple of weeks? What would need to happen to allow this to happen without sinking the company? JOT down every detail and give it to your partners/colleagues to shoot holes in the plan and then implement.
- If my vacation time is less than 11 days or less this year, is there time I’m leaving on the table? If so, why do I feel it’s necessary?
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. But the goal is to help move all of us out of the mindset of constantly achieving to a mindset of living on purpose.
Work hard, but rest well!