Piggybacking on public holidays to create longer breaks, taking off Mondays are among the tricks
4 min
It is barely past New Year’s Day. If you’ve taken the day off, congratulations: You have aced your first test of vacation-day math.
We get only so many days of paid time off a year. And that is if you’re lucky—one in five U.S. private-sector workers gets no PTO, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Without a strategy, you can have a generous number of vacation days and still feel like you never truly got away from it all.
Think of the times you took a mini-break from work only to feel stressed before and afterward. The average American worker with five years at the company gets 15 paid days of vacation in a year, BLS data show. That leaves little room for bad planning if you want a serious break or two, plus some long weekends and the occasional personal day.
Maxim No. 1: A vacation day equals more than a day of vacation when you attach it to a public holiday or two. Taking the day after New Year’s this year snags you a four-day weekend at the start of 2024. Timed just right between federal holidays and weekends, 15 days of PTO can turn into nearly 50 days of extended break time this year. (That is, if your co-workers don’t beat you to claiming those dates.)
Another guiding principle—Fridays off are overrated, and not just because they are peak traveling days. For a long weekend or a random personal day, there is evidence to suggest a Monday and Wednesday can be more satisfying. But more on that later.
First, some science: To really recharge, you need at least one weeklong vacation, bracketed between two weekends, research suggests.
In one study of more than 50 people who took vacations for an average two weeks, participants’ well-being levels didn’t peak until their eighth day off. A 2023 study of more than 300 vacationers found people who took between eight and 14 days off reported greater and longer positive effects once they returned to work, such as better sleep, than those who took shorter breaks.
One to two weeks off, in fact, appeared to have longer-lasting benefits than lengthier vacations. After a while, “you creep back to old habits,” says Ty Ferguson, a research associate at the University of South Australia in Adelaide who co-wrote the study. His own recent getaway—several days down the coast—went bust when his three children, ages five and under, came down with a bug. Then it was time to return.
“I should take more of my own advice,” he says.
One reason taking a week-plus vacation is important is that is enough time to actually reduce workloads. Network-equipment giant Cisco recently conducted a deep data dive on employees’ work habits and well-being, examining more than three years’ of metrics such as virtual meetings, badge-ins, PTO and engagement surveys. When workers took a day or two off, the number of meetings they had in the month didn’t change much—they just packed in more work before and after their time off.
Meeting loads dropped sharply for workers who took at least five consecutive days off. The fewer the meetings, the greater tendency to report healthier routines and better stress-coping abilities, Cisco found.
“I always believed in the long weekend because it can be so hard to take a week off,” says Cisco’s chief people officer, Kelly Jones. “I was wrong.”
To get the most out of your finite days off, consider Gail Martino’s PTO hack for 2024. “I’m a leisure laggard,” says the senior project manager in New Haven, Conn., of her habit of waiting to take vacation time until things get slower. (Hint: That is never.) Then there is a scramble to use it or lose it toward the end of the year, with the days she does take off feeling not terribly satisfying.
“You wonder, why am I so tired?” she says.
In recent years, she’s become a bird watcher and wants to take a couple of birding trips along the Eastern Seaboard in 2024. “I spend a week in the woods, among trees and nature, and that is an incredible break,” she says. “Now I want to chart out the entire year.”
Scanning the 2024 calendar, she devised a spreadsheet of dates bridging public holidays and weekends with a theoretical 15 vacation days and four personal days. (Working at Unilever for 18 years, she got about a week more PTO than that in 2023.) The result was 50 days of extended breaks, including 9-day stretches in July and over Christmas:
A little tweaking can wring nearly the same number of extended break days with just 15 vacation days and no personal days—that is, if you get a full slate of federal holidays off and don’t have to trade off with co-workers:
Want to take a three-day weekend that isn’t attached to a federal holiday? Take Monday off instead of Friday, suggests Jim Burch, a 38-year-old software engineer in Phoenix and an avid hiker. Taking Fridays off often results in cramming five days of work into four, he points out.
“I’d get so stressed out on the Thursday before,” says Burch, who at his current job, has more autonomy over his schedule than in earlier jobs.
Delaying gratification until Monday means your co-workers have no choice but to start the workweek without you. Back Tuesday, you can quickly catch up on whatever emails or developments you missed, he says.
Then there is the unexpected pleasure of a Wednesday off. “It is like a midweek weekend,” says Rachel Blenkhorn, a social-media production manager for a real-estate investment trust who lives in Warren, Mich. It is long enough to relax or take care of appointments yet short enough to get back in the work groove on Thursday, she says.
There is science as to why, says Dawna Ballard, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert in chronemics, the study of time as it relates to communication.
“Everyone has a different chronotype,” or their own biologically driven pace, she says. A break after two days’ work gives you a second chance in the week to return to your internal rhythm. Psychologically, it also creates a bit of “slack” in the workweek, alleviating the stress that comes from feeling like there is too little time to get everything done.
However you plot your vacation days in 2024, don’t leave any on the table. They aren’t just good for you, there is evidence they are good for your career.
An Ernst & Young study of its employees showed every extra 10 hours of vacation was linked to an 8% improvement in year-end performance reviews. Another study found people who took more than 10 vacation days a year were more likely to get a raise or bonus than those who took fewer days.
Now that is a formula anyone can get behind.
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More men are staying home to facilitate the complex juggle of family life and their wives’ high-powered careers
6 min
Suzanne Donohoe , a top executive at the private-equity firm EQT , started the month of September with a 10-day business trip through Asia and Europe. Back in New York, her husband, Matt Donohoe , was helping their three teenagers begin a new school year.
That was no simple task. Though the Donohoe children are close in age, each goes to a different school and has different extracurricular activities. Matt drove their 13-year-old to hockey practices in New Jersey and took all three children to Boston for a tournament. In between, there were groceries to buy, meals to prepare and homework to assist with.
It was all in a day’s work for Matt, who quit his job in 2007 to help out at home. A former emerging-markets trader with degrees from Georgetown and Columbia, he is part of a quiet but growing force of men who hold down the fort at home while their wives climb to the upper echelons of finance.
Wall Street has long struggled to elevate and retain women. A hotly competitive industry that demands long hours, frequent travel and the need to be on call constantly, it has been an unwelcoming environment for women, particularly those with children.
Women who have leadership roles in finance say that having a spouse who stays home—a househusband, if you will—can relieve that burden and allow them to rise. Even these privileged women, who have a spouse at home and often extra help beyond that, say maintaining the arrangements is a complex feat.
For the men, being a househusband can come with a stigma: Society often still assumes men will be the bigger earners and women the primary caregivers. But that is starting to change.
In 45% of U.S. opposite-sex marriages, the wife earns as much as or more than her husband, a share that has roughly tripled over the past 50 years, according to a 2023 report from Pew Research Center. Dads represented 18% of stay-at-home parents in 2021, up from 11% in 1989, another Pew study found.
There are now househusbands at the highest levels of power. Doug Emhoff , married to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, gave up his career—as an entertainment lawyer—to facilitate her political rise after she was elected vice president. On Wall Street, the list of women with husbands at home includes the chief executives of Citigroup and TIAA, the chief financial officer of the private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners, and the global co-head of Blackstone’s real-estate business, among others.
Senior female executives whose partners also work say they have to manage an intense balancing act and admit to being envious at times of their peers whose husbands don’t work.
“The prototype of the person you are competing with, the people in nearly all of the successful positions, have a stay-at-home partner,” says Suzanne Donohoe, who was a partner at Goldman Sachs and KKR before joining EQT in 2022. “The disheartening part of the message is somehow you can’t achieve if one parent isn’t at home.”
She says she doesn’t think that is the case and knows and admires people in demanding jobs who make it work with neither spouse at home.
Many couples say they started out with parallel professions but reached a point at which the woman’s career accelerated. When one person needed to devote more time to parenting, it made more sense for it to be the man.
Chip Kelly was working in tech sales at an international startup in 2009 when his wife, Natalie Hyche Kelly, who is a Visa executive, gave birth to their first child. After the couple didn’t move quickly enough to get a spot at the daycare they wanted, Chip volunteered to care for the baby and work while she slept.
He took calls while pushing their daughter in the stroller. When she went to sleep, he worked through dozens of emails. The couple had twins a few years later. Around that time, Natalie was promoted and started commuting to San Francisco four days a week from Charlotte, N.C., where the Kellys lived. Chip tried to work while caring for the twins and their older daughter when she wasn’t in preschool.
After the family moved to San Francisco, Chip realised that he was neither doing his job nor parenting as well as he wanted to. He decided to devote himself full time to the latter.
“It was kind of becoming a no-brainer because my wife’s career was going so well,” he says.
The Kellys are now starting their third year in London, where Natalie serves as the payments company’s chief risk officer for Europe. Chip considered going back to work a few years ago, but so far has decided against that because his family relies on his being at home.
“I’m like the safety net for a trapeze artist,” he says. “You don’t think about it unless they take it away.”
Kathleen McCarthy Baldwin, Blackstone’s global co-head of real estate, was nursing her second child in 2015 when her husband, Matt Baldwin, left his job as the CFO of a research firm and decided to take some time off.
“The idea of him not working made me very anxious, mostly because of my fears about what it would do to our marriage,” she says. “Would I be envious that he had more time with the children? Would he resent that I had this really exciting and demanding job?”
Matt told her he wasn’t worried. After spending a summer with their daughters at the Jersey Shore while Kathleen mostly worked in the city, Matt decided to make the change permanent.
These days, he rises at 5:30 a.m., before the rest of the house is awake. He makes oatmeal for the family four mornings a week, giving himself one morning off. On most days, Kathleen takes the girls to school while Matt goes indoor rock climbing.
After school, he and their nanny divide the responsibilities, with one taking the older daughter to sports practice, drama and guitar lessons and the other transporting the younger one to swimming lessons, violin and dance. Matt, who has become a skilled cook, usually makes dinner. Specialties include salmon, soft-cooked eggs and spicy pasta.
Kathleen says her husband’s decision to stay home created the flexibility for her to pursue other interests outside work, such as serving on the board of an anti-hunger nonprofit.
“When I talk with other women in this position, we all say our husbands are a very special breed,” she says. “They don’t define themselves by their jobs.”
Not all men are as comfortable in the position.
One stay-at-home dad whose wife works in private wealth at an investment bank says he sometimes tells other men that he manages real estate—technically true because the family owns a few buildings. He says he can identify other men in his position at private-school functions when they say they “manage investments” or “run a boutique hedge fund.”
“We’re all out there, but we can’t say anything about it,” he says.
Paul Sullivan has been trying to change that. He founded a group called the Company of Dads after leaving his job as a columnist for the New York Times in 2021. Sullivan’s wife runs an asset-management firm and became very busy with work after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sullivan already defined himself as what he dubs a “lead dad,” the go-to parent for everything from playdates and doctors’ appointments. But he found no support groups for men in his position. He reached out to senior female executives and asked them about the idea of creating one. They approved. Some said their husbands didn’t help enough. Others said their husband’s friends made fun of them, calling them names like “Mr. Mom.”
“Two things can be true at once,” Sullivan says. “Moms can be discriminated against in the workplace, and dads can be afraid to take a lead role at home.”
Sullivan now organises events for lead dads such as a Father’s Day beer fest and a March Madness get-together. He gives talks at workplaces and hosts a podcast on which he interviews therapists, parenting coaches and fatherhood advocates. He counts the husbands of Goldman Sachs partners, JPMorgan Chase managing directors and top law partners among his members.
For the Donohoes, having Matt at home has meant that he has developed a close bond with his children. Suzanne says it has given her credibility with her colleagues when she needs to attend one of their doctor’s appointments or sporting events.
There are still mix-ups. Schools often call Suzanne first if one of the children is sick or needs permission to do something even though Matt is listed first on contact forms. Once it happened when she was in London on business. She gently asked the school administrator to call her husband. He was at their apartment five minutes away.
