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Small business owners work tirelessly throughout the year. Unfortunately, a great many of them hardly find the time to celebrate that hard work in the form of a well-deserved vacation.
Funding Circle recently surveyed 1,395 U.S. small business owners on their holiday plans and practices and found that a stunning percentage hardly leave work back at home.
Thankfully, the website offered a few tips to relieve stress in the best possible way if you can sneak away to an exotic destination. But before that happens, many of you have to actually take a vacation. According to the survey, a whopping 33 percent of small business owners say they will indeed take time off, which amounts to just five days all year. And 17 percent say they don't plan to take a vacation at all, working the entire year with only their friends' Instagram feeds to placate their urge to travel.
But let's say you pry these worker bees away from the office for a few days and get them to actually board a plane for pleasure. According to the study you will still see them pore over emails thanks to a smartphone that continues to tether us all to the business world. The study states 30 percent of respondents would check email at the very least once a day and 40 percent would so on multiple occasions per day.
Having said all that, Funding Circle does offer some tips to actually, you know, enjoy your scant time off away from the daily grind.
Now it might ramp up the blood pressure, but its first tip is to ditch the smartphone, which makes a lot of sense for the workaholic out there. Simply, there is no way you will enjoy any amount of a holiday if you can check on work, because you will check on work. If you can't be trusted, let the location work for you by booking a trip to somewhere without Wi-Fi. That way you are forced to actually enjoy nature's call.
When that fails, the site recommends actually setting aside a work-related time of the day when you can dive deep into things back at home. The immersion, obviously, stops when the timer goes off.
Lastly, the site encourages you to use the time to be creative, which did manage to help other business owners.
Funding Circle states: "Eyal Levy got the idea for his business, Yogibo, while traveling with his very pregnant wife on a 'babymoon' trip to Israel. Today, Yogibo is a multi-million-dollar retail business with 20+ stores around the country."
Essentially, pulling the plug on business back at home can actually benefit that same company when you return.
Travel does more than uplift; it motivates and encourages creativity. Your next great idea may come the second you let the senses take in more than the incessant feed of emails and text messages.
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