take back your time in 2008

What do you want most for your life in the coming year?

As we pause and look ahead to the coming year, full of possibility and promise, we think about the things that really hold the most value in our lives. It may not be a fancy car or even a higher-paying job (not that we don’t want those things!) that hovers highest on the radars of our consciousness—it is that most precious commodity of all, time. Time to be with the people we love, time to experience this great, wide world, time to just be ourselves and live life in a simple, unfettered, stress-free way, if only for awhile!

Perhaps you have taken a little time off for the holiday season and have stepped out of the regimes and responsibilities of your working life right now. Feels good, eh? Even if you are like me, and absolutely love your job and the challenges it presents, it still is vital to step away now and then for some inner revitalization. Now is a good time to think about taking back your time.

According to the Take Back Your Time website, www.timeday.org, only 14% of Americans will get a vacation of two weeks or longer this year. High-paced, stressful job roles for many in the U.S. also means that a good percentage of those with vacations will not use them, for fear of being laid-off or demoted if they are gone, or just the stress involved with transitioning to and from vacation time.

The statistics are staggering. The TBYT site points out that unlike 127 other countries, the U.S. has no minimum paid-leave law. Australians have four weeks off by law, the Europeans four and five weeks. The Japanese two weeks. We have zero. On average, we work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) LONGER per year than our peers in Western Europe do.
In fact, we’re working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country.

Take Back Your Time has launched a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment. It is a non-partisan effort and is wide in it’s scope – read the details on the Take Back Your Time website.

If you are one of the lucky few who is allocated vacation time in 2008, and one of the brave fewer who actually take it, ABC news has tips for easing the stress of your getaway from the office in their online article, “The Death of the American Vacation” by Tory Johnson.