I expect to hear “I bet you are looking forward to your vacation next week” quite often over the next few days. My wife and I are heading out on our annual winter pilgrimage to much warmer weather, where she can sit on a beach or by a pool and I can play golf all day for a week. But I don’t get to look forward to that until the night before we fly out.
Like many of you, when I’m not at work, not as much work gets done. And in a business where we can’t just turn off the lights, lock the door and come back to pick up where we left off a week ago, that means I have to get two weeks worth of work done in just one week. This week I have to book twice as many interviews for Bob Burnell to talk to while I’m gone. Working on stories that are not time-sensitive for inclusion in newscast all next week. Recording weekend programs two weeks in advance and producing a 67-item checklist so that the people that are here can complete all of the daily tasks that I handle.
It’s almost like the system punishes you for taking time away from your job. Maybe we should adopt the attitude that Europeans have. No one goes to Spain in August because everyone in Spain is on vacation in August–and nothing gets done while they are gone. It’s a good thing the countries don’t border each other, or Germans would likely have to be brought in just to keep things operating efficiently.
One thing that I’m good at is unplugging and forgetting about this place while on vacation. I don’t wake up in the morning worrying “Did Anthony Domol send the morning forecast?”. And I turn off all the “breaking news alerts” on my phone so that “Trump Tweets Insults at North Korea” doesn’t wake me up at 3:30 am.
The pile of work that you need to do before a vacation–and that you face when you come back–is likely the reason that Americans take less time off than all other industrialized nations–and why so many of us leave vacation time on the table every year. So now it’s off to tackle my doubled workload, so I can have a few days to relax and recharge for the double-work week on the back-end.
