Weekend

You think when people talk about vacation that they must be referring to the paid annual leave, but they don't neccesarily have to be so. Listen to Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and you will see how.

I came across her thinking on how to get more people take their vacations - and I think her answer sums up perfectly: "But then we realized, we actually have breaks in our lives already." Presenting: the weekend.

Holmes' team ran a series of experiments and found surprisingly impressive effect of having the mindset to treat the weekend like a vacation. Nothing special. Simply being randomly assigned to instruction "to treat the weekend like a vacation." That was it. This may seem impossibility, but it is true that a vacation mindset is enough to get the participants happier, less stressed and worried, and more satisfied on Monday than those control subjects who were instructed to treat the weekend like a regular weekend.

The good news, if you could call it that, is that we can still reap the benefit from an hour of protected time (say, on Saturday afternoon) even we can't have two consecutive days of Saturday and Sunday off work.

What better way to celebrate my weekend?