Why You Have Vacation Guilt

Image by Sarah MacReading

To millennials entering the workforce, the idea of an unlimited vacation policy probably sounds amazing. And it's meant to: Unlimited vacation days—or "open paid time off"—are a way to attract young talent. And with a name like that how could there possibly be a catch?

"Kind of ironic," Cameron Vass, an environmental organizer, told me, "the guy with unlimited vacation physically has no time to talk about it."

I would tell you more about Vass, but I didn't get the chance to fully interview him. Vass was working an 80 to 90 hour week and doesn't have much time to chat. Unlike many millennials, he happens to work at one of the 2 percent of companies that has an unlimited number of vacation days offered to their employees. But like millennials across the nation, Vass didn't like feel he can take time off.

"There's so much work to do in environmental organizing, and I don't see myself taking any time off soon," he told me. "Kind of psychologically nice, though, to know it's there."

Turns out the only thing millennials are better at than be underemployed is being overemployed. Baby Boomers might call us the "laziest generation," but millennials are working the longest hours of any generation. Even the lucky few working under an unlimited vacation policy are rarely taking more than three weeks off.

"I think maybe I don't take that many vacations?" said Mattias Lehman, who works at Riot Games, a studio boasting an unlimited vacation policy. "I'm doing something I love so it has never really occurred to me to take time off from work."

In 2009, the idea of unlimited vacation was cutting edge. Netflix released its "Netflix culture deck," which became incredibly influential in Silicon Valley. It might read something like a cult handbook ("You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or the group") but it also had some good ideas about de-bureaucratizing the workplace in a world of changing technology where no one is really ever on or off the clock.

So other companies followed suit: Rather than abandon a vacation policy, which is what Netflix did, some created policies of limitless vacation.

"Netflix sort of pioneered the space," said Katie Denis, the senior program director of Project: Time Off, an advocacy organization for vacation time. "They do it very well because they have an entire culture built on freedom and responsibility. But if you introduce it to somewhere which doesn't fit the culture, people are going to be more fearful and err on the side of caution."

So, for instance, if you introduce it to a culture of, I don't know, perennially underemployed overeducated overly-eager millennials saddled with a trillion dollars in student loans and a desperate fear of being laid off?

"One of recommended we take a week off after that just to decompress," he said.

"I think that if you have an experience where an unlimited vacation really works for you, you've got a manager behind that policy who was being thoughtful about how it's applied," said Nightingale. "Make sure your team is rested and productive. I mean that's what it's really about, it's not a setting you can dial so that your company is suddenly progressive and positive."

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