BarryGrussling.com

The first official "holiday vacation" from my new employer is almost over. Monday morning will be back to work bright and early. Its amazing how much vacation increases work productivity. Read on for my ramblings on this idea.

It seems to be common knowledge that people, especially Americans, don't take as much vacation as they 'should'. According to linked article, Swedish workers lead the way with 44 days per year of vacation time. Compare that with my 14 days a year, and I start thinking I need to move to Sweden.

The interesting thing is, after taking a vacation such as the one that I am currently wrapping up, I start to think about work more. I won't come out and say that I am 'bored', as there are pleanty of things to suck up my interest, but I will say that I am open to the idea of going to work. Maybe even happy to have something challenging to do. If I am 'happy' to be at work, I will get tons more done than if I was unhappy.

It seems to me that this creates an interesting situation:

1. People only get work done when they are at work.
2. People work best when they are ready to work (I.E. relaxed and lulled by vacation)

Obviously these two requirements are competeing with eachother. If people were always vacationed up, they wouldn't be at work, so nothing would get done. On the other hand, if people were always at work, they wouldn't get vacation, and thus they wouldn't be happy workers. Because different companies offer different options for vacation time, it can be deduced that the ideal solution hasn't been found yet. What we (we == humanity) need to do is figure out the equation that gives productivity in terms of vacation time, take the derivative, set it equal to zero, and find the critical points. After that, we can test those critical points (I volunteer for the one at t = 365 days per year), or we could take the second derivative and figure out the local maximum. After that, we could all take that amount of vacation time and everyone could be confident that humanity was maximizing its output.

This has about as much chance to succeed as Communism. Sounds good on paper, but in reality every CEO would have a different equation for productivity.

Guess I will be happy with my two weeks a year, as I don't want to learn Swedish right now.