This article is a must-read for everyone who has experienced the symptoms of professional burnout at least once in their career. These are mainly physical and emotional fatigue, depression, loss of motivation, personal identity, and as a consequence, a sense of reduced accomplishment.
Burnout is a serious medical diagnosis threatening to grow into the global pandemic.
Gallup recently surveyed more than 7,500 full-time employees about burnout. 23 percent of those workers said they felt burned out more often than not. An additional 44 percent reported feeling burned out sometimes. To put that into context, nearly two-thirds of full-time workers are dealing with burnout at some point while at work. – hrexchangenetwork
Ok, but now quite a few employees go to the office regularly. Most of the companies adopted a remote workstyle due to coronavirus limitations. Did the work-from-home concept impact burnout statistics? Yes, but the new data is not too optimistic.
The pandemic and remote work are wearing on the tech workforce, with 68% of respondents to a new survey saying they are more burned out than when they worked in an office. – Geekwire
The problem is that when home and office are actually at the same place, there is no border separating private and work life. You can’t resist the temptation to work till late, to check your emails more frequently, to communicate with clients and colleagues out of office hours, make business decisions, and combine many more home and office activities.
This makes the impression that your work and private life are messed up. You are available for business 24/7, which leads to stress and burnout.
Is There Any Remedy?
I guess I can give you a couple of tips that help me keep my work-life balance, stay motivated, and accomplish my tasks successfully. First of all, you need to separate your work and personal life.
- Talk to your boss about a coworking space. I believe they will agree to pay for your membership and you will get much more than just a comfortable place to work. You will enjoy a supportive community, a special business atmosphere, beautiful interiors, and cool amenities, not to mention tasty coffee and cookies.
- Next, you need to learn to enjoy the flexibility of remote work instead of tolerating it. For instance, I work for andcards, a coworking space software development company that is fully remote from day one. Team members can work from any place or country they like, which is a huge benefit all of us are actively using.
You can do the same and go on a workation to restore your mind-body balance after an exhaustive project accomplishment. You may have your own reasons to set off for workation, for instance, you may want to change the scenery, find some inspiration, study foreign culture, whatever. The main thing is to convince your boss to let you go and make sure that workation is exactly what you need at the moment.
What Is a Workation
If you imagine a workation like a guy above, you are right and wrong at the same time. Workation is not all-day chilling on the beach, you have a vacation for this. During workation you need to combine work and vacation, which can be challenging sometimes, especially if you go on your trip unprepared.
I am going to reveal to you some secrets of a successful workation later on. But before that, let’s answer the main question of this article – is workation a panacea for professional burnout, or is it just a trick that makes you work more even during rare vacations.
Everything depends on how deep you understand the term and what goals you are looking to accomplish. For instance, if you want an additional vacation with friends and family while trying to keep your boss happy with your work, you will fail.
But if you want to restore your energy, find peace and serenity, network with people from other countries sharing similar interests, do some sightseeing in a country you’ve never been to before while spending most of your day working on your ongoing projects, you are likely to succeed.
In other words, you need to understand the difference between vacation and workation, never replace one term with another, plan your trips, and choose destinations accordingly.
Now let’s highlight the main pros and cons of a workation.
Pros and Cons of Workation
Since I am a fan of traveling, workations, and digital nomad lifestyle, I couldn’t find many downsides of workation. If you think I’ve missed something, please let me know in the comments.
- When on workation, your leisure time is limited. So, even if the destination is amazing and you want to explore it from one side to the other, you need to set your priorities and take care of the weekly tasks at the first turn. The best advice here is to go on workation for at least a couple of weeks to avoid disappointments. Give yourself enough time both for work and adventures.
- Since your colleagues are sitting in more prosaic environments and expecting your availability during office hours, your rest or thrilling trip may be interrupted at any moment.
Pros:
- You can plan your work the way you wish. For example, you can start your day with yoga on the beach, then check your emails lying in a hammock, write an article near the pool, receive a call in the garden smelling the blooming flowers, take a surfing lesson after the workday, and watch the most beautiful sunset in the mountains with a glass of wine before sleep.
- Even if you are interrupted all the time, your tropical island or another wonderful destination doesn’t disappear and when you are done with your job, you can come back to the beach.
- You get motivated by meeting the local entrepreneurs’ community.
- You learn new things about different cultures.
- You live new experiences, enjoy the moments, feel true emotions.
- You forget about stress, anxiety, and burnout.
- You reboot your mind and open it to new strategies, bright ideas, and unconventional approaches.
This list of my own top workation pleasures goes on. However, if you are trying to escape burnout and find your zen, it’s better to look for it in the appropriate places. This is critical, as your best workation destination must offer all things you need for productive work along with perks you couldn’t even think of. Let’s see what I’m talking about in the next section featuring the best places for workation on Earth.
Top 3 Destinations for Digital Nomads and People on Workation
Nomadic lifestyle and workation become more popular each year. Nearly 5 million independent workers describe themselves as digital nomads. Coworking centers located here and there are not enough to meet their growing demands, so we can observe the appearance of entire villages and even islands welcoming digital nomads.
The most popular of such colonies are located in Thailand and in Bali, besides, I couldn’t help mentioning the first nomadic village in Portugal (Madeira.) Let’s take a quick tour around these places of power.
The Content Castle (Ko Samui, Thailand)
As I am a writer, I will start with this small writer’s paradise. The Content Castle is a six-bedroom house on Koh Samui located five minutes from charming Lamai and filled with a multitude of inspirational corners, reading nooks, meditation hideaways, and writing alcoves.
Its spacious balconies are hung with hammocks and loungers to relax, read, or write overlooking the expansive sea view afforded by the beachside location of this coworking and coliving space.
Dojo Bali Coworking
Dojo Bali is more than a coworking and coliving place. It is a community of like-minded individuals, exchanging skills and knowledge in the pursuit of a better quality of life through work-life balance.
Dojo Bali is unique and cozy, its members are diverse, transient, and cosmopolitan. They regularly host events with and for the community, including masterminds, workshops, community BBQs, skill-sharing sessions, networking events, inspirational events, and social meetups.
Space itself is a hip two-story venue a stone’s throw from the world-famous surf break Echo Beach. It boasts state-of-the-art facilities, 6 business grade load-balanced fiber-optic lines, an amazing pool surrounded by lush tropical gardens, air-conditioned conference rooms, soundproof private skype booths, hot showers, and a mix of large breezy spaces and nooks for collaborative or individual work.
Digital Nomads Madeira
As I have already mentioned above, Ponta de So is the first European digital nomad village to open in Portugal (Madeira) in February. Madeira is one of the most beautiful places in the world with its luxurious green, a blue warm ocean, good weather all year round, great internet, tasteful food & wine, and great people.
Ponta do Sol is a picturesque village that gathers history, culture, agriculture, gastronomy and can become your next hot destination with a free working space, events, access to the community, and all of its natural beauty.
Of course, there are many more places to go on workation, and you can find them here along with a bunch of workation tips.
Over to You
I sincerely hope that this article was useful and persuasive enough to at least consider the possibility of going on workation. Please drop me a line if you agree or disagree that workation is a great remedy for professional burnout. And don’t forget to share this blog with your boss and friends workaholics 😉
The article was written by Helga Moreno, workation evangelist and marketing manager at andcards, a technology company developing coworking space software focused on members.
