I generally agree with the thrust of the post and am a big fan of the blog, but that Ernst and Young study seems to be vapor-ware. As much as I believe in vacation and just came back from a wonderful one myself, 8% improvement per ten hours is still a very impressive result and needs to be scrutinized. Relative to what baseline? Is there a threshold? This is a very convenient quotable – it’s just too meme-like to be trustworthy without the original study.

All the links to this “study” link to other press articles, with no direct link to anything except a book on Amazon that supposedly cites it (and the book is written as the same person as the HBR article [edit: and the NYT article you cited]). Perhaps the book has a real citation, or the author has privileged access to some study, or perhaps I simply can’t find it, but from what I can see/Google it doesn’t look reliable enough to make a decision on.

Regardless of whether the study in fact exists and matches the claims being cited in the press, I dislike that your created graph shows “points” as if they were raw data, with 8% improvement for every 10 hours, which implies that this works like clockwork or a law of nature. I’m sure there is tremendous individual variation and also from company to company, industry to industry. At best, it may have been a linear regression analysis on a noisy internal data set, and with no trace of the original citation I feel especially uneasy with that graph. It would be better to show the raw data, if it were available.

In any case, the graph is for decoration and adds no new information.

I hope this helps,
Jon

LOL!! I didn’t see that one coming. Nice! And congrats Alex!! I’ve found nothing helps “work-life balance” more than an amazing spouse. =)

I wish we could like individual quotes in the post, because this one is good. I wish I had this knowledge 3 years ago when I was helping launch a new department. It would have helped with burnout. However, my company actually offers a paid one-month sabbatical that can be taken every 4 years, starting after year 8. Almost time to take advantage of it!

Learning what you know now, would you build week-long vacations in to a startup’s 1 and 2 year roadmaps, or do a shorter but more frequent vacations?

“by not taking time off, you’re stealing productivity and creativity that could be moving the business forward.”

I couldn’t agree with you more !!!

I love everything you wrote here, but I’m wondering: despite the planning, how many times/how often has (or hasn’t!) something gone wrong while the essential person has been on vacation? What did you do in that situation?