by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 3:25 PM ET, Wed July 29, 2026
Vacations are supposed to be a time to relax and unplug from the demands and frenzied pace of everyday life.
But we all have our own definition of vacation, of course. And for some people, getaways have increasingly become yet another opportunity to make every minute count, even when doing so means returning home more tired than before you left.
A recently conducted survey from the digital self-knowledge platform MyIQ reveals that time off is increasingly being judged by how efficiently it is used, rather than how restorative it ultimately feels.
Indeed, the survey findings show that pressure, guilt and overplanning are following travelers even when they leave the workplace behind for some R&R.
“Vacations are meant to interrupt the demands of ordinary life. Yet for many travelers, they now reproduce them: tightly managed schedules, carefully sequenced activities and an expectation that every day should deliver a measurable return,” explains the MyIQ report.
According to the MyIQ survey of 13,684 adults across the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Latin America, 69% of travelers feel pressure to make every day of a vacation “count."
In many cases, that pressure even begins before departure: 63% of respondents said they spend more time planning a vacation than deciding where they actually want to go.
“Choosing a destination reflects personal preference. Optimizing a trip requires comparing options, organizing each day, and attempting to reduce the possibility of regret,” the report explains.
Translation: planning a vacation has morphed into hard work.
Or as the MyIQ report explains, productivity has become more than a workplace habit. It increasingly shapes how people evaluate leisure, replacing a simple question, whether a trip felt enjoyable or restorative, with a more demanding calculation: how much was seen, how little time was wasted, and whether every opportunity was used properly.
Some of the additional survey takeaways include:
- Once a vacation begins, inactivity can feel harder to justify. 57% of survey respondents said they feel guilty when they spend an afternoon doing nothing during a trip.
- Nearly half, 48%, reported returning home feeling as though they needed another break.
Combined, these two data points may indicate a growing pressure among travelers to use time efficiently on vacations. But the pursuit of maximizing every moment of a getaway can undermine the recovery that time away was supposed to provide.
The same pattern influences decisions made during the vacation itself.
- 42% said they had changed their travel plans because they worried they were spending too long in one place.
- Another 38% said they had chosen activities they were not especially interested in because they felt they should experience them.
According to MyIQ, these responses suggest that overscheduling is only part of the issue among travelers. “The deeper shift is the replacement of personal preference with an external idea of what a successful vacation should contain,” the report explains.
Sarah Meyer, managing director of MyIQ, said the results show how thoroughly people have learned to treat time as something that must continually demonstrate its value.
“Productivity culture no longer ends when the workday does,” Meyer explained.
“It has taught people to see time as an asset that should always produce a result. On vacation, that can turn a quiet afternoon into a source of guilt and a full itinerary into proof that the trip was worthwhile. The risk is that rest becomes another performance metric.”
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