Before Vacation, An Out-of-Office Experience

"We found that what happens is in the week leading up to the vacation, stress increases. You feel stress to a high point until you get to the trip itself," says John Lounsbury, a University of Tennessee psychology professor who has profiled vacationers. "There's the pre-vacation expectations, the general hassle and the anxiety of getting ready."

And then, ahhhh! Lounsbury says the actual vacation drops stress levels while increasing "life-satisfaction" measures. "Once you get on vacation, family tends to reconnect and things that make people happy get reinvigorated," he says.

If you ever get there. Chuck Norton's pre-vacation preempted his vacation. Last May, when he was all prepared to escape to travel some Southern country roads for a few days, the apparel sales manager in Decatur, Ga., ended up never really taking time off.

"I spent half the time working," says Norton, a self-described workaholic who also writes a bloglike Web site, Deadjournalist.com, and does deejay gigs. "My vacation consisted of me watching 'The Price Is Right' and working."

Now, Norton remembers more fondly the days leading up to the vacation that never materialized. "It is better than the vacation itself, because there is the anticipation," he says. "It is perfect in its hopes and dreams of what might be."

"Things in corporate America have become a whole lot more stressful -- the job security, the efficiency expected, the more hours," says psychologist Paul P. Baard, who teaches communications at Fordham University's Graduate School of Business. "And here you are, accumulatively tired from the previous 50 weeks. So all this stuff adds to anxiety."

The solution, says Baard, is to be 100 percent where you are. "If you're at work, be focused on work," he says. "Having one foot at work and one foot on vacation is counterproductive. And that includes not thinking about work when you are on vacation."

Point taken. CareerBuilder.com's "Vacation 2006" survey found that of the more than 2,500 workers surveyed, 27 percent said they plan to work while on vacation this year, and 16 percent reported feeling guilty about missing work while on vacation.

And this at a time when workers need their vacations more than ever before: The survey found that more than half of workers say they work under a great deal of stress, and 77 percent say they feel burned out on the job.

"Absolutely, these days you find individuals who fess up that they are planning to do some work on vacation," says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder.com, calling electronic access to work while on vacation an "e-leash." "I don't see it as somebody still glued to their computer and doing it from the beach. They're sort of checking in, and that makes them more comfortable."

Gunnar Aronsson, a psychologist at the National Institute for Working Life in Stockholm, says pre-vacation stress is increasingly overlapping into vacation time. In the International Journal of Health Services last year, he reported study findings that 15 percent of Swedish workers returned to work from lengthy vacations not rested or recuperated.

"Many people, especially in expansive and dynamic jobs, are very stressed the last weeks before [vacation] and work overtime and still they have job undone when it is Friday 4 p.m. and they should leave," says Aronsson.

"In a way, you can relax a little the last week before [vacation] because of the new opportunities to go on with undone work independent of time and place," he says.

Leisure experts (now there's a job that probably doesn't suffer pre-vacation issues) have been saying for years that a brain is a terrible thing to waste by working on vacation. Now some management consultants are embracing those pre-vacation wind-down days as the natural order of things. Even suggesting that smart managers should spring for a half-day off -- on the house-- that last day, sending good workers packing a few hours early. And here's a little extra spending money, too!

All right, maybe not that last part. But you get the idea.

Dale Collie, a business consultant based in Boone, N.C., and author of the management guide "Winning Under Fire," says especially because of the blurred line between work and play, it's management's responsibility to make sure workers truly get a break while on vacation -- and even beforehand.

Collie says when he was corporate sales manager and later ran an international charity, he would schedule sit-down time with employees a couple of weeks before their vacations, not only to ask what plans they had, but to go over what they needed to get done before they left. "It brings them up to speed," he says. "But I really did care that they went on vacation for themselves."

Dan Surface, a national business consultant and management trainer based in Fort Wayne, Ind., says he's so sympathetic to folks struggling through their last day of work that he thinks bosses ought to give them a $50 gas card and wish them well on their way out the door.

"It shows employees you really are behind them as they head off to the beach," says Surface.