Commentary

Can Execs Disconnect From The Office While On Vacation?

Um. Nope. According to a recent study by The Ladders, nearly 80% of all executives plan to take a vacation this summer. While fully one-third said they'd refrain from checking in at all, just over half said they'd touch base with the office periodically when on vacation.

Um. Nope. According to a recent study by The Ladders, nearly 80% of all executives plan to take a vacation this summer. While fully one-third said they'd refrain from checking in at all, just over half said they'd touch base with the office periodically when on vacation.Mobile e-mail-capable smartphones are great tools for staying in touch with the office. And that's part of the problem. While they may enhance productivity for on-the-go workers who need to remain in constant contact with their e-mail when out of the office, that connectivity often seeps into family time and even vacations.

It may seem an innocent enough notion to "just check" your e-mail on a device such as a BlackBerry for anything critical when presented with a few spare moments on vacation. The odds are, though, that you'll get sucked into responding to a few e-mails (even noncritical ones) and before you know it, you've missed happy hour in the pool and your spouse and/or kids may want to beat you up.


More Mobility Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

Of the execs polled, 34.6% said they could completely disengage from the office and make the most of the summer vacations. Still, that leaves the majority of execs at least peeking periodically at work-related issues when on vacation. Not only will 51% of them check in to make sure the ship isn't sinking, 33.1% admitted that they never leave home without their laptops and BlackBerrys, vacation or not.

Just last week AOL announced the results of a new poll about e-mail addiction in the United States. I think the results underscore the blurring lines between professional and personal time in our lives.

How many of you find yourselves answering work-related e-mails at 10 p.m. while watching TV? What about vacations -- will everyone really be disconnected, or remain at least partially connected?

C'mon, fess up.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links