The ‘worliday’.

[caption id="attachment_4400" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Many people find that being completely cut off from work can be extremely stressful."][/caption]

The combination of the average workaholic and an increasingly common addiction to technology devices like smart phones and laptops means that sometimes the key to relaxation is not necessarily sun bathing by the pool sipping cocktails.

Many people find that being completely cut off from the work environment can actually have an adverse effect as the constant underlying speculation of what is happening at work can be a strain, causing a stressful mindset.

Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times has found a solution: the worliday. A combination of ‘work’ and ‘holiday’, this concept allows the individual the freedom to access anything work related while away without feeling guilty.

Despite breaking the obvious, conventional rules of a holiday – no work emails, no work related talk, no work stress to be carried further than Heathrow airport – the worliday can have a more relaxing effect than going ‘cold turkey’, according to Kellaway.

“Intellectual stimulation charges my batteries more reliably than sitting in the rain with bored teenagers”, says Kellaway, whose daily routine whilst on holiday does not rule out a sneaky peak at her work emails just to check what’s going on.

Kellaway maintains that the trouble with banning anything work-related while on holiday is that by the time the office worker arrives in a new country, it takes at least a week to ‘unwind’, forget about work, and adjust to new surroundings. No sooner has this been achieved than the worker has to return to the office where the necessity of having to catch up with a mountain of work leads to a more stressed state than before going away.

Not only can a worliday be less of a shock to the system, but technically it also means “you should be able to go away more often to compensate for the fact that you are still (sort of) working when absent” says Kellaway.

So the worliday could become a common phenomenon for workers who wish to escape for a while but do not want to lose touch with their working world. Some say that it is a shame to lose the traditional values of a holiday, but if the end result is a happy and relaxed office worker, then the worliday can be no bad thing.

To find out more about the worliday, head to the BBC Website.

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