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Americans Are Using PTO to Sleep, Not for Vacation–Report

randycupertino 1y ago
> The new report found that one-third of workers aren’t spending their vacation on leisure because they’re using it to recover from exhaustion. That rate was highest among millennials, at 43 percent, followed by 34 percent of Gen X, 33 percent of Gen Z and just 20 percent of baby boomers. > The survey also found that higher earners were 26 percent more likely to use PTO for sleep than those earning under $100,000. On average, Americans who took PTO for sleep used two to three days to catch up. I feel like I could certainly use a week of PTO to catch up on sleep!! Maybe 2-3 days to relax and 3 days to do all the chores around the house I never have time for.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Yeah I've actaully tried that but the chores part doesn't happen. The only way I get chores done is to just do them a little bit every day. Chores accumulate a little bit at a time and they are best managed the same way so that they don't pile up and start looking insurmountable.
mothballed 1y ago
If you have kids, PTO staycation is the only escape.
re-thc 1y ago
Unlimited PTO = never waking up?
- monster_group 1y ago
  One doesn't need unlimited PTO to be dead.
SoftTalker 1y ago
> Some people feel like their vacations are more work than the actual vacation was supposed to be This is me. Vacations are not relaxing. Travel is exhausting. Sleeping in a hotel bed is not restful. Running around all day packing in "new experiences" is exhausting. To me a vacation is doing nothing. No plans. No goals. Just let the days unfold.
- mc32 1y ago
  It seems like people felt it was an obligation to “go somewhere” when taking time off. Like it was an expectation. Sure it’s okay to take a trip and see places but it’s definitely not a must. It’s an occasional “should” just to see other parts of the world a couple of times.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I find seeing other parts of the world to be vastly overrated. It is sometimes good to get away from your normal locale just to disconnect from it if that improves your ability to relax. But seeing the Great Wall or the Louvre.... not compelling to me.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      On the other hand, it is my reason for living. I work to be able to travel. People have different wants and priorities. That’s ok.
    - bobthepanda 1y ago
      I think that with travel, you really have to focus on what you would like to do, and everything else is really secondary. For me waiting in lines for tourist checklists is not really my thing, I am more happy sampling food and nightlife and whatnot. Everyone likes something different.
  - saulpw 1y ago
    If you don't go somewhere else, particularly out of cellphone range, you're at risk of being called about work.
29athrowaway 1y ago
An alternative: Inemuri (just sleep at work) https://www.ecosa.com.au/blog/post/inemuri-the-japanese-art-of-sleeping-at-work.html https://www.ecosa.com.au/blog/post/inemuri-the-japanese-art-...
jrmg 1y ago
An Amerisleep.com survey of more than 1,200 Americans revealed that 37 percent used vacation days in the past year just to rest. I’d like to see the wording of this survey. If it’s something like ‘did you use vacation time to rest?’, it seems to me that it’s likely to always have got a large percentage of ‘yes’ answers. Isn’t that partly what vacation has always been for?
- bko 1y ago
  > Have you done the following in the past 12 months just to catch up on sleep? > Used PTO days > Taken a vacation https://amerisleep.com/blog/top-cities-for-sleep-vacation/?srsltid=AfmBOooxlxkJTNQjCgCbnl3PX5L31uhIOY6mumclfBBVortfHt0eXM0u https://amerisleep.com/blog/top-cities-for-sleep-vacation/?s... I pay no attention to anything that comes from a survey. It's meaningless. It's just so lazy. Look at average hours which went to a high of 35 hours in 2021 (probably peak WFH), and now down to 34. This is all likely noise, but there's nothing to suggest Americans are overworked and burnt out. There are a ton of other measures, like annual hours worked, etc and none of them show an increase in the amount Americans work. Maybe people don't like their jobs, but it says more about expectations and attitude than anything else. You hear this stuff all the time from commentators and politicians. I've heard hours worked is lower because "everyone has multiple jobs", and you look it up and it's 5% and pretty steady from the past 25 years https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
  - notmyjob 1y ago
    Uh, isn’t your first link from a survey?
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      I think maybe they mean something like "questionnaire poll survey" vs "data reporting survey" (i.e. the former comes from asking random people a hopefully well phrased question and seeing who responds, the latter comes from many businesses just feeding payroll data up to the government to be analysed directly), but even then... a good questionnaire poll is nothing to ignore.
hinkley 1y ago
When I was a hot shit young programmer being underpaid, I tried several times to negotiate a shorter work week in lieu of more money. My theory was either Friday afternoon or better Monday morning so I could sleep in a bit after the weekend. Until recently I was a night owl. And the problem with trying to take a trip out of town on the weekend is that if your flight is delayed or you just want to save money, it’s much easier to guarantee you’re home by 9 am on Monday than by 11pm on Sunday night. If anything goes wrong with your transportation you end up with a more stressful Monday. Later when I had flexible hours I was able to sustain a middle distance relationship by working 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday and beating Friday traffic out of town to go see her. I still think everyone in software should be working 32 hours a week. I’ve been vocal in the past about making that a four day week, but it’s the morning commute and the lunch break epiphanies that really make the 8 hour day a lie, and I worry that taking one of those day away would have a bigger negative effect on productivity than taking 1.6 hours away from every day, the first hour or so of which is emphatically a productivity/hour boost.
- com2kid 1y ago
  HBO Max (pre merger) had a 32hr work week in the summer. (Not sure about now). Productivity remained constant, there were plenty of Jira stats to back that up. Meetings got shorter and more organized, small talk was cut down. People hustled more to get stuff finished. There have been studies showing we only have 20-30 productive hours of knowledge work per week. Adding more hours to the work week doesn't really result in more getting done, although it can result in a project actually going backwards if tired devs start submitting buggy code at a rate faster than bugs are being fixed.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    I’ve gotten a better sense of when I’m grinding gears in the afternoon but if you’re really focused on a vexing problem it can be tricky to check in with yourself. Ids say probably about every three months I leave work one day thinking I’m five hours away from solving a problem, then overnight I realize I’m doing it the hard way, delete a third of my code and I’m done in 30-60 minutes, mostly due to tests and build times. I think more and longer breaks would also help.
weinzierl 1y ago
Somehow I expected "Americans are using PTO for side hustles" but this is probably just me speaking from within my HN bubble.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  People don’t post on mundane things in general, and HN in particular is a hub for side hustle content. There was an article that got posted to the Seattle subreddit about how it was a bad place for AI startups because no one was willing to pull 996 to innovate, and the local reaction was to laugh whatever “thought leader” said this out of the room.
bbitmaster 1y ago
I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over? What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.
- 1123581321 1y ago
  I don't know if I see the expectation part of it. A common reply, at least around me, to "what are your plans?" is "enjoying family time" or "just catching up on things" and that's met with some appreciative remark. However, in companies/neighborhoods with more wealthier and type A people, I could see relaxing seeming strange.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  I don't think it's strange to enjoy some time off at home, but also think it's bothersome for it to commonly be a "do we rest or have a vacation this year" kind of situation from the other extreme. I have a feeling the problem here is more to do with reporting on a loosely worded poll than anything else though.
- danaris 1y ago
  The major root of this is the Protestant work ethic, which leads very directly to the idea that your only value on this earth is the work that you do. So any time you are spending resting is, effectively, sinful. Most people don't put it that way these days, but the basic idea is still deeply embedded in so much of American culture.
  - Ferret7446 1y ago
    I don't think vacation would be considered work under the Protestant work ethic even if it requires effort to plan?
blindriver 1y ago
I would use a sick day to rest, not PTO.
- jerlam 1y ago
  PTO usually refers to a system where vacation time and sick time are combined into one allocation.
drivingmenuts 1y ago
The time off doesn't come with a mandate to go somewhere else - it's just time off from work. If I went somewhere, I'd be just as tired as if I didn't; it would just be a different kind of tired. So, rest and sleep, at home, works for me.
nativeit 1y ago
This “article” is covering the survey from a mattress company. I wouldn’t take this very seriously.

> The new report found that one-third of workers aren’t spending their vacation on leisure because they’re using it to recover from exhaustion. That rate was highest among millennials, at 43 percent, followed by 34 percent of Gen X, 33 percent of Gen Z and just 20 percent of baby boomers. > The survey also found that higher earners were 26 percent more likely to use PTO for sleep than those earning under $100,000. On average, Americans who took PTO for sleep used two to three days to catch up. I feel like I could certainly use a week of PTO to catch up on sleep!! Maybe 2-3 days to relax and 3 days to do all the chores around the house I never have time for.

SoftTalker 1y ago
Yeah I've actaully tried that but the chores part doesn't happen. The only way I get chores done is to just do them a little bit every day. Chores accumulate a little bit at a time and they are best managed the same way so that they don't pile up and start looking insurmountable.

mothballed 1y ago

If you have kids, PTO staycation is the only escape.

re-thc 1y ago

Unlimited PTO = never waking up?

monster_group 1y ago
One doesn't need unlimited PTO to be dead.

SoftTalker 1y ago

> Some people feel like their vacations are more work than the actual vacation was supposed to be This is me. Vacations are not relaxing. Travel is exhausting. Sleeping in a hotel bed is not restful. Running around all day packing in "new experiences" is exhausting. To me a vacation is doing nothing. No plans. No goals. Just let the days unfold.

mc32 1y ago
It seems like people felt it was an obligation to “go somewhere” when taking time off. Like it was an expectation. Sure it’s okay to take a trip and see places but it’s definitely not a must. It’s an occasional “should” just to see other parts of the world a couple of times.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I find seeing other parts of the world to be vastly overrated. It is sometimes good to get away from your normal locale just to disconnect from it if that improves your ability to relax. But seeing the Great Wall or the Louvre.... not compelling to me.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    On the other hand, it is my reason for living. I work to be able to travel. People have different wants and priorities. That’s ok.
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    I think that with travel, you really have to focus on what you would like to do, and everything else is really secondary. For me waiting in lines for tourist checklists is not really my thing, I am more happy sampling food and nightlife and whatnot. Everyone likes something different.
- saulpw 1y ago
  If you don't go somewhere else, particularly out of cellphone range, you're at risk of being called about work.

29athrowaway 1y ago

An alternative: Inemuri (just sleep at work) https://www.ecosa.com.au/blog/post/inemuri-the-japanese-art-of-sleeping-at-work.html https://www.ecosa.com.au/blog/post/inemuri-the-japanese-art-...

jrmg 1y ago

An Amerisleep.com survey of more than 1,200 Americans revealed that 37 percent used vacation days in the past year just to rest. I’d like to see the wording of this survey. If it’s something like ‘did you use vacation time to rest?’, it seems to me that it’s likely to always have got a large percentage of ‘yes’ answers. Isn’t that partly what vacation has always been for?

bko 1y ago
> Have you done the following in the past 12 months just to catch up on sleep? > Used PTO days > Taken a vacation https://amerisleep.com/blog/top-cities-for-sleep-vacation/?srsltid=AfmBOooxlxkJTNQjCgCbnl3PX5L31uhIOY6mumclfBBVortfHt0eXM0u https://amerisleep.com/blog/top-cities-for-sleep-vacation/?s... I pay no attention to anything that comes from a survey. It's meaningless. It's just so lazy. Look at average hours which went to a high of 35 hours in 2021 (probably peak WFH), and now down to 34. This is all likely noise, but there's nothing to suggest Americans are overworked and burnt out. There are a ton of other measures, like annual hours worked, etc and none of them show an increase in the amount Americans work. Maybe people don't like their jobs, but it says more about expectations and attitude than anything else. You hear this stuff all the time from commentators and politicians. I've heard hours worked is lower because "everyone has multiple jobs", and you look it up and it's 5% and pretty steady from the past 25 years https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
- notmyjob 1y ago
  Uh, isn’t your first link from a survey?
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    I think maybe they mean something like "questionnaire poll survey" vs "data reporting survey" (i.e. the former comes from asking random people a hopefully well phrased question and seeing who responds, the latter comes from many businesses just feeding payroll data up to the government to be analysed directly), but even then... a good questionnaire poll is nothing to ignore.

hinkley 1y ago

When I was a hot shit young programmer being underpaid, I tried several times to negotiate a shorter work week in lieu of more money. My theory was either Friday afternoon or better Monday morning so I could sleep in a bit after the weekend. Until recently I was a night owl. And the problem with trying to take a trip out of town on the weekend is that if your flight is delayed or you just want to save money, it’s much easier to guarantee you’re home by 9 am on Monday than by 11pm on Sunday night. If anything goes wrong with your transportation you end up with a more stressful Monday. Later when I had flexible hours I was able to sustain a middle distance relationship by working 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday and beating Friday traffic out of town to go see her. I still think everyone in software should be working 32 hours a week. I’ve been vocal in the past about making that a four day week, but it’s the morning commute and the lunch break epiphanies that really make the 8 hour day a lie, and I worry that taking one of those day away would have a bigger negative effect on productivity than taking 1.6 hours away from every day, the first hour or so of which is emphatically a productivity/hour boost.

com2kid 1y ago
HBO Max (pre merger) had a 32hr work week in the summer. (Not sure about now). Productivity remained constant, there were plenty of Jira stats to back that up. Meetings got shorter and more organized, small talk was cut down. People hustled more to get stuff finished. There have been studies showing we only have 20-30 productive hours of knowledge work per week. Adding more hours to the work week doesn't really result in more getting done, although it can result in a project actually going backwards if tired devs start submitting buggy code at a rate faster than bugs are being fixed.
- hinkley 1y ago
  I’ve gotten a better sense of when I’m grinding gears in the afternoon but if you’re really focused on a vexing problem it can be tricky to check in with yourself. Ids say probably about every three months I leave work one day thinking I’m five hours away from solving a problem, then overnight I realize I’m doing it the hard way, delete a third of my code and I’m done in 30-60 minutes, mostly due to tests and build times. I think more and longer breaks would also help.

weinzierl 1y ago

Somehow I expected "Americans are using PTO for side hustles" but this is probably just me speaking from within my HN bubble.

bobthepanda 1y ago
People don’t post on mundane things in general, and HN in particular is a hub for side hustle content. There was an article that got posted to the Seattle subreddit about how it was a bad place for AI startups because no one was willing to pull 996 to innovate, and the local reaction was to laugh whatever “thought leader” said this out of the room.

bbitmaster 1y ago

I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over? What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.

1123581321 1y ago
I don't know if I see the expectation part of it. A common reply, at least around me, to "what are your plans?" is "enjoying family time" or "just catching up on things" and that's met with some appreciative remark. However, in companies/neighborhoods with more wealthier and type A people, I could see relaxing seeming strange.
zamadatix 1y ago
I don't think it's strange to enjoy some time off at home, but also think it's bothersome for it to commonly be a "do we rest or have a vacation this year" kind of situation from the other extreme. I have a feeling the problem here is more to do with reporting on a loosely worded poll than anything else though.
danaris 1y ago
The major root of this is the Protestant work ethic, which leads very directly to the idea that your only value on this earth is the work that you do. So any time you are spending resting is, effectively, sinful. Most people don't put it that way these days, but the basic idea is still deeply embedded in so much of American culture.
- Ferret7446 1y ago
  I don't think vacation would be considered work under the Protestant work ethic even if it requires effort to plan?

blindriver 1y ago

I would use a sick day to rest, not PTO.

jerlam 1y ago
PTO usually refers to a system where vacation time and sick time are combined into one allocation.

drivingmenuts 1y ago

The time off doesn't come with a mandate to go somewhere else - it's just time off from work. If I went somewhere, I'd be just as tired as if I didn't; it would just be a different kind of tired. So, rest and sleep, at home, works for me.

nativeit 1y ago

This “article” is covering the survey from a mattress company. I wouldn’t take this very seriously.