“Rest
is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s
day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across
the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
--Sir John Lubbock
The
cover story of the 1 June 2015 TIME magazine is entitled, “Who Killed Summer
Vacation?” A companion piece might be, “Who stole your life?”
As
someone observed, the U.S. is becoming known as the
"no-vacation nation." The
culprits identified in the article include the rise of the service economy
full of unskilled and interchangeable workers; the decline of organized labor;
that vacations are expensive when wages are flat; technology that tethers you
to work; and insecure workers afraid to take off a week, let alone two weeks
back-to-back.
The
downside to this human and economic predicament is the potential for an unsafe,
unhealthy, unreflective, and unproductive workforce.
What’s happening to us?
Over time our minds take in more than they can process--and
delete. There isn’t enough space between
meetings to think about the latest great idea, let alone implement it. The result—is too much stimulation and not
enough assimilation.
In
an excerpt from the book, The Mature Mind by H. A. Overstreet, here is what we
learn about an overstimulated mind which apparently begins at an early age:
We now know that a child is likely to
be halted in its growth toward psychological maturity if it is subjected to too
many stimuli that call for an immediate reaction and given too little
leisure and privacy to assimilate what it has experienced.
It is simply not suitable for a child to
have too many toys so that it never has time deeply to love one, or to be too
consistently surrounded by people, or to be too always on the go, or to
have so many activities organized for it that it never has time just to be
itself in a kind divine idleness.
The process of psychological
maturing is more than the process of receiving impressions, one after
another. Instead, it is savoring
these impressions until they yield their meaning.
It is the process of letting new
experiences turn around and around in the mind until they find the angle at
which they want to settle down among old experiences.
We as a people are, in many
respects, like children who have been exposed to too many changing stimuli in
too rapid a succession; we are both excitable and emotionally fatigued; both
ready for the new, whatever it is, and unready for any of its meanings that are
not on the surface: both ego-centered wanters of more and more and generous
givers of what we have—less in the spirit of those who will divide their last
crust than in the heart of those who feel that they will soon have something
better to take the place of what they give away.
Overstreet
penned those insightful words in 1949.
Stress is costly
What's
the antidote to partial attention? Multi-tasking? Interruptions?
Mindfulness.
A
2010 Harvard study found that people spend 47% of their days thinking about
things other than what they actually do. That statistic goes a long way toward explaining why some are prone to
errors, having to do the same tasks to get them right, a cost that
eventually finds its way into the price of goods and services.
Renewing the human spirit
Consider
that in 2013 American workers with access to paid time off left 429 million
vacation days on the table, an average of 3.2 days per worker (U.S. Travel
Association).
The
research also showed that while some employers allow workers to bank their time
off from year to year or to receive payouts for unused time off at
termination, nearly 170 million vacation days came from “use it or lose it”
policies and vanished into thin air.
By
not taking all the time they had coming, the study reasoned that Americans did
$52.4 billion worth of work—for free. A
seemingly good deal for employers, but in the end, not really.
As
summer approaches, more employers (The Motley Fool, TED Conferences, and Rand
Corp.) are putting in place incentives to encourage scheduled idleness. It may not be as idyllic as "watching clouds float across the sky," but it does include going off the 24/7 grid for a time to achieve a rested body
and mind. Even indispensable employees need to recharge their batteries.
A corporate HR vacation policy that
helps renew one's outlook on career and life may be the most crucial bottom-line decision a
business can make.
©
Bredholt & Co.
