TIME OFF Planning to relax while on vacation

Don't interrupt your vacation for work unless it's a real emergency.
By MARSHALL LOEB
CBS MARKETWATCH
NEW YORK -- Look upon your next vacation as an investment.
As with any investment, you expect to get something out of your vacation, including a sense of being refreshed and revitalized, which should help your job performance when you return.
There's considerable evidence that vacations pay off in many ways. Regular vacations reduce the risk of death for men by about 20 percent, researchers at the State University of New York at Oswego found. Frequent vacations cut the risk of heart attack among women by nearly 50 percent, according to the famed Framingham (Mass.) Heart Study.
Here are some rules for making the vacation you take really successful, unstressful and revitalizing, a break in the action that aims to leave you rested, creative and regenerated:
RULE ONE
Do actually take a vacation, indeed take all the vacation time to which you are entitled. A large and growing number of employees don't. They foolishly figure if they skip vacation, they'll gain some points at the office and at least benefit from face time. In fact, their performance only stands to suffer over the longer term, and their bosses will think that they are suck-ups or suckers. Many an insecure manager or worker figures that his job may be wiped out while he is away. Alas, this happens with disturbing frequency these days, but by forgoing a trip, the vulnerable manager or worker can only postpone the inevitable.
RULE TWO
Go to your boss right now and schedule the vacation you plan to take two years from now. Better yet, schedule two vacations two years from now. Sound crazy? Well, Norm Augustine, former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, did just that ever since he was a middle manager in the 1970s, and it sure didn't hurt him. Augustine figures that if you put in for a holiday two years in advance, your boss can hardly say, "Sorry, I was planning to have a crisis just then." But if, indeed, some world-class last-moment crisis should erupt, you can always take one of those other vacations you have scheduled.
In any case, book your vacation well in advance. Some people wait until the last minute, figuring to take a "spontaneous vacation." But, warns Kansas City psychologist Marilyn Hutchinson, a self-described great vacation-taker, "People with animals and houses and kids may try to take spontaneous vacations, but they end up not happening."
RULE THREE
Plan your vacation so you go where, and do what, you really want. Psychiatrists who study these matters say it is remarkable the number of people who come back from vacations feeling more anxious and traumatized by them than before they left. They were simply impulse shoppers for vacations. They didn't consider that they would be bored stiff after lying on the beach for 20 minutes. When they return, they suffer from vacation hangover. You have to plan your vacation, and what you want to get from it, with the same care and objectivity you would bring to any important business decision. It might be a good idea to plot out what you will do every day while you're away.
A good vacation, says psychologist Hutchinson, "is doing what you don't usually get to do."
RULE FOUR
Don't try to squeeze in too much before, during or after the vacation. A recent Gallup survey of 1,000 adults found that 36 percent of those employed said that they worked harder or stayed longer at the office in the days leading up to vacation. More than a quarter said that the increased job stress made them lose sleep. In all, 46 percent packed the night before and 10 percent packed the day of the trip.
Psychologists say many vacationers came back from their holiday feeling tired. Sometimes it pays to return home a day early to make the transition between play and work.
RULE FIVE
Choose quality over quantity. Unless you really enjoy roughing it, seven days of the best vacation you can buy is better than 14 days on a tight budget. In fact, the trend in travel is toward shorter vacations -- partly because more people are going the briefer-but-better route, and partly because two-career families find it harder to coordinate their schedules to take long vacations together.
Hutchinson, for example, tries to take one short vacation every quarter. There is also a trend toward learning or adventure vacations -- Outward Bound and campus courses for couples are popular. The Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers rightly figure that such bod-tightening, mind-opening efforts will expand their horizons and enhance their careers.
RULE SIX
Don't ever, ever interrupt a vacation to confront a crisis or put out a fire back at the home office. That is, don't do it unless 1) some really career-changing event explodes, and 2) you also can do something about it. Those situations are extremely rare.
Vacationis interruptus is no fun.
RULE SEVEN
Do keep in touch with the office if you think you have to, but on your terms. Pick a time that you will phone in every day or second day to get truly important messages. Let your colleagues know that they may speak with you then, but only then. Limit the period that you take calls or do work to an hour or two a day. Authorize one person -- your deputy or your assistant -- to call you at other times, but only in cases of real emergency.
Warns Hap Le Crone, a psychologist in Waco, Texas: "Don't say to your boss, 'If anything comes up, don't hesitate to give me a call.' You'd be shocked at how many people do just that because of their need to please."
There is no escape from the Information Highway. Online messages have even been sent to climbers on Mount Everest, and UPS has brought packages to riders at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But keeping in touch only when and how you want liberates you to enjoy the rest of your vacation.
It also liberates your colleagues. Says Martin Payson, a New York lawyer, who has been in the habit of taking four-week treks every two years in Nepal, Kenya or Pakistan: "People get used to focusing without you. You're showing a sign of confidence -- in them and in yourself -- and giving a healthy signal that nobody is indispensable."