The United States has no vacation policy -- and neither do families, judging from surveys of workers' time off. Are we doing it wrong? Tell us how you use breaks and vacations to manage your productivity, and we'll publish your best responses later this week.
If something must exist for it to be broken, then U.S. national vacation policy cannot be broken, because there isn't one. Here's a graph of federal paid annual leave policies across advanced economies in the OECD. Look to the far right. See us? We're the one at zero.
Since it's August, and you're either on vacation yourself or barely working at your desk, I wanted to turn the question over to you. Instead of focusing on the national level, l want to hear from your personal experience. What kind of vacation and time-off policy does your company offer, and -- most importantly -- do you agree with it? Or do you think there would be a smarter way for companies and employees to work together to create a schedule and vacation policy that maximized both our happiness and even our effectiveness?
When are you at your most productive? If you're like me, you ask yourself that question all the time. And 95 years ago, Dr. A. F. S. Kent tried to answer it by studying factory workers by day of the week. He determined that people worked least effectively on Mondays and best on Saturdays (this was before two-day weekends were national). This conclusion has been duplicated again, and again -- well, at least half of it. The Monday blues are a real thing, studies have repeatedly shown. But most workers really start firing on all cylinders some time toward the middle/end of the week before they occasionally flag on Friday.