Flexible office space company Regus asked 12,000 workers in 85 countries about their intentions to work during the end-of-year holidays and found a few of the year’s biggest occasions aren’t enough to keep Americans away from the office (or their smartphones). The company found:

• 64 percent of U.S. business people will work during the last week of the year.
• 56 percent of those working during this time will travel into the office to do so.
• Yet a hefty percentage of American respondents – 39 percent — believe workers will get very little done in this work time.

These numbers come on top of an another poll from RingCentral showing 70.4 percent of U.S. business owners, executives and independent pros surveyed expect to work more this holiday season than last year. Only 14 percent plan to take a real vacation, meaning a complete break from work, including work-related emails or phone calls. Filling in this dismal picture of vacation starvation is the annual doom and gloom from Mercer’s 2011 Worldwide Benefit & Employment Guidelines, which shocked exactly no one by showing workers in the U.S. have among the least generous statutory employee holiday entitlements (entitlements they don’t even take full advantage of).

What does this have to do with connectivity and the future of work? Simple: Constant connectivity and eroding work-life boundaries may be making it even more difficult for vacation-starved Americans (and even those in more vacation-friendly countries) to really get away. Just take the tiny percentage of workers RingCentral revealed will be taking a real vacation by severing their connection to work entirely as exhibit A. Add to these difficulties the seemingly endless pressure of a dire economic climate and the vacation complications caused by our increasingly international teams, which creates the need to decide which holidays, if any, remote employees are entitled to and you have a recipe for increasing levels of holiday deprivation-induced burnout.

Do you get the sense that our Americans vacation starvation is getting worse due to larger workforce trends?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon.

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The benefits of the blurring of these boundaries are obvious, but less discussed are the downsides, and several experts feel that there is at least one serious one: increased workaholism and the potential for burnout. Does being on the cutting edge of connectivity and evolving workstyles make web workers more vulnerable to becoming workaholics? Paul Miller, the founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, definitely believes so. He told WebWorkerDaily:

One of the downsides of the digital workplace is addiction to work. Companies are actually facing the opposite problem of the one they thought they’d have, which is that people would essentially not work hard enough. They actually overwork. You’ve seen it all around — people are working on holiday, working in the evening, working at the weekends. People are working much longer hours and seeing this blurring of work-life as being a positive thing, where I actually don’t think it is. I think it’s really important to know when you’re working and to know when you’re not working. If you’re using the same device for work as for talking to your mom, you start to forget which bits are work and which bits are the rest of your life. And actually I think people are becoming addicted to being connected.

Miller isn’t the only one with this worry. Contacts organizer Gist has been promoting the concept of a new workstyle that blurs the boundaries between the personal and the professional, but it’s not a change that comes without pitfalls, according to Gist’s VP of Marketing, Robert Pease. Technology and the workstyle it enables provide great benefits, but they also put significant demands on our maturity and self-control. He told us:

Web workers are very innovative people and they’re very into new stuff. You can get an activity stream of your friends, your favorite brands and your customers, and everything becomes almost overwhelming. It’ll be interesting how the web worker on the front edge of this is going to evolve to have a true on/off switch — to know that it’s OK not to be watching everything every second of every minute of every day.

You can very easily sit online 24 hours a day. As much as you’re willing to consume can be delivered. You can always pick up your phone and you can always see your messages. But you also have the ability to not pick up your phone. What that requires is a level of self-awareness and a level of maturity, for lack of a better word, to know that work is always going to be available to you, but you need to balance fulfilling things in your life than are not related to being online — running or hiking or time with your children or throwing a ball with your dog.

Of course, correlation is not causation. So perhaps rather than web work turning people into workaholics, it’s simply that ambitious, workaholic types are more drawn to web-work-style jobs in the first place.

What do you you think: Are web workers more likely to struggle with work addiction? Is this because of their basic character or the nature of their workstyle?

Image courtesy Flickr user Joye~

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I recently read a Harvard Business blog post by John Baldoni about staying creative under pressure, and he has several good suggestions: set standards, get a buddy and mandate time for fresh air. While he’s talking about working under pressure, I use similar strategies to address burnout. (As an aside, if you don’t already read the Harvard Business blogs, you really should. They are a great change of pace from most of the technology blogs that I read. They are very well written and cover interesting topics from different points of view.)

Here’s my take on Baldoni’s three suggestions, plus an additional tip of my own to help reduce burnout and get your productivity back:

Set standards. Take a hard look at how you spend your time and figure out which of those activities — business and personal — are the most important and worthwhile. Re-prioritize your activities and adopt some system for making sure that you focus your time on the important activities, and be brutal about cutting any activities that take too much time while not providing enough value. Make sure that you find time for a few fun activities to balance out all of the work.

Get a buddy. For freelancers, this can take a couple of different forms, and I would think of this as your support system. If you are overloaded and have too much work, find someone who can help out with some of the activities or that you can refer potential clients to when your schedule is full. This could also be someone to pick up some work if you need a vacation. On the other hand, maybe you need moral support or a mentor to coach you through some issues, so this might mean having a regular coffee or lunch meeting with someone who can help. In my case, I rely on the many events that I attend to chat with other freelancer friends to share ideas, talk about issues, brainstorm about technologies or get moral support.

Mandate fresh air time. This is important, and for many of us, it seems to be one of the first things to fall out of our schedules. We spend way too much time sitting on our rear ends and not enough time getting the blood pumping. A good fitness program can have a huge impact on your productivity. This doesn’t mean that you need to run a marathon, but you should find a comfortable way to work regular exercise into your day. It could be a few short walks spread throughout the day, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking or biking instead of driving, or something more strenuous. I vary my workouts depending on my mood and the season. We have gorgeous weather in Portland this time of the year, so I try to take advantage of the hiking trails in many of our local parks, but during the rainy season, I’ll spend more time in the gym.

Read for fun. Reading can be very relaxing, and I usually have at least one non-fiction book to expand my horizons while also reading a fiction book just for fun. Lately, I have been reading George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series for fun while also reading some books about online communities and technology. Take a few minutes every evening to read something you enjoy. The key to making this work is to read something you enjoy so that it feels like a reward, not a punishment.

How do you stay productive without burning out?

Photo by Rick Turoczy, used under Creative Commons.

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A List Apart recently published a great article by Scott Boms, “Burnout,” that examines the stress, exhaustion and illness often associated with web work. Burnout is not just stress, he notes, but is caused by an “imbalance in an individual’s personal goals, ideals, and needs as related to their job.” So how can you regain that balance? Boms outlines several steps you can take, including:

Stop (or at least slow down). When you realize you’re suffering with burnout, it’s important to start taking steps to reduce the amount of work you’re doing. Cut down on the hours that you’re working, use sick days, or take a vacation.

Set boundaries and expectations. When you’re no longer working a regular 9-to-5 schedule you need to set boundaries between your work and home lives (see my previous post “Mark the End of the Day and Finish on Time“). It’s also important to manage your clients’ expectations. As Boms notes, when you start answering client email at 10pm, it sets a precedent that is then hard to undo.

Create a daily routine. Most people have a time of day when they work most effectively. Organize your day around these times (see our previous post “Change Your Work Hours to Get More Done” for tips on how to do this).

Make time for numero uno. Sometimes it’s hard to justify making time for yourself when there are so many demands on your day from bosses or clients, but everyone needs some “me time.” Spend time with family, goof off, visit a gallery, play a game — whatever makes you happy.

Change your situation. Changing careers might be in the cards, but there are also plenty of steps you can take to improve your current one. Shake up your routine (try working from somewhere else, perhaps), offload responsibilities, or learn a new skill.

Rely on a good process. If your current process isn’t working as well as it should, try another one. GTD works for me.

There’s plenty more detail, tips and information in Boms’ article. It’s also worth checking out the discussion thread on A List Apart, too.

Are you feeling burned out? What steps are you taking to make sure you don’t get burned out?

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