Travels in the Riel World

Have you ever dreamed about being location independent? That is, to be able to live and work from wherever you choose in the world? It’s a topic that is growing in popularity, as evidenced by this Location Independent website, or even by the number of hits the term generates in a Google search. Andy Hayes is a strong proponent of location independence, and he just wrote a nice article about the concept for Brazen Careerist.

Here is some of what he has to say about what location independence is and isn’t:

This is not about being an endless nomadic; it’s about finding a working style that suits you. This is not about entrepreneurialism; while owning your own business makes it quite easier, you can still roam a bit more freely while working for someone else…

The common feature of people working towards location independence is that they’re working on a life that works for them, not the other way around. Just because you are setup to work from the road doesn’t mean you travel 100%; I myself tend to alternate between periods on the road and then stints back at home base here in the UK. Yes – another myth – I have a home base, like many other location independent professionals do. You don’t have to live out of a suitcase if you don’t want to.

There are as many ways to be location independent as there are ways to be a 9-to-5’er (does anybody really work nine to five anyway?). Think about the characteristics or attributes of the life that you want, then find ways to make that happen.

Check out his full story here. By the way, Andy also runs the Sharing Travel Experiences website and a while back he ran an online interview with me. If you somehow missed that, you should check it out.

That’s a philosophy that John Bardos tries to take to heart and live by. There are a lot of people out there who have taken the risk to travel, to make a career break, or to live a so-called unconventional life. John is one of them. He runs a blog called Jet Set Citizen, about “lifestyle design at the intersection of work, play and travel.” There is a great interview with him online at Business Backpacker.

How did you know you didn’t fit in to conventional society?

There is no reason why we should drive on the right side of the road or the left. The idea of getting a job and working at one company until retirement is only about three generations old and it is already dead. The concept of retiring at age 65 was created in 1935 with the Social Security Act in the U.S. Even that has to change because of the increase in average lifespans. Everything around us is just an idea. If you realize that, then it is easier to see that there is no set plan for life and we are free to do whatever we want.

Encouraging words you would pass on to readers: If you could have had someone there when you took the leap of faith, what would you have needed to hear the most?

The only real risk in life is dying or getting sick before you have a chance to do the things you want. When you start getting older and more and more of your friends and family get sick or die and you lose energy and motivation, you really start to understand how short life is. I don’t want to sound like a parent telling his children how tough life was in the past, but it is all true.

We live in a time of great affluence and opportunity. It is easy and cheap to travel around the world, start new businesses and even become famous if we are willing to put in the work and are able to commit our energies to a single focus. The greatest times in my life have been when I didn’t have much money, didn’t have many possessions and was working insane hours to accomplish something. The “good life” is not an easy life. Easy makes us fat and lazy.  Even if you completely fail, there are unlimited opportunities to start again. Our parents never had these opportunities. Our grandparents couldn’t even imagine this level of wealth and choice. There is no excuse for not attempting great things in life. The only barrier is our own fears, which are generally unfounded, and our unwillingness to do the work required.

Check out the entire interview with John. It’s good stuff.

On Monday I wrote about an online interview with me in which I talked about my view of sabbaticals and some of the reasons that my wife and I had decided to take a career break in order to travel. Well, here is a nice follow-up to that post: an article by Sherry Ott that details 10 good reasons for taking a career break. Here are two of them:

Retirement Doesn’t Always Reward You with the Time or Ability to Travel - Have you ever really thought about the person you will be when you are 65? What will your health be like, what will your sense of adventure be like, and most importantly, will your health be able to support your sense of adventure?

What activities are you saving for your retirement - bungy jumping in New Zealand, climbing mountains in Nepal, hiking the Great Wall of China, or horseback riding in Mongolia? Will these things really be possible at retirement age? We spend all of our life waiting, waiting, waiting…until we are free from the shackles of work. However what if when we are unshackled, we can’t do it? Consider taking a mini-retirement now, while you know you can trek the Inca Trail.  If people can have a mid-life crisis, then why can’t you have a mid-life retirement?

Cure your Hurry Sickness and Return to Simplicity - Many Americans are plagued by ‘Hurry Sickness’.  The more we speed up, the less we can slow down. Not only do we multi-task at work but we multi-task our leisure time as well - watching TV and surfing the web, or working out on the elliptical and reading a magazine. We are no longer capable of simply doing one thing and being happy about it.

This has also made us a very impatient society – some may even say rude. How many times have you pressed the “door close” on the elevator, even though someone else is trying to get on? And how often do you catch yourself tapping your foot and huffing away while standing in line for something? We always seem to be in a rush to get nowhere fast.

A traveling career break will force you to slow down and learn to be patient again. As you immerse yourself into other cultures you will observe simplicity and patience that Americans have somehow lost. Sure it can be a frustrating experience letting go of how you expect things to get done, but it will open up your eyes to how the rest of the world operates. In the process you will actually have time to take it all in and appreciate a new, simpler way of doing things.

See the entire article for eight more reasons to consider a sabbatical.

It does seem that more and more people these days are turning themselves into some version of a digital nomad. In a basic sense, this could simply be an individual who is disconnected from an office and prefers to do much of his or her work in local coffeeshops or other WiFi hotspots. But there are also a growing number of people who are either moving abroad to a cheaper and more exotic locale, or even ditching a home base altogether and running businesses from the road. These men and women are living a life that would have been unimaginable in previous decades, but which is now possible because of new technologies and the globally interconnected world in which we live.

Mike Elgan recently penned an article for Computerworld about this very trend:

Sell the house and the car. Put up all your possessions on eBay. Pack your bags and buy a one-way ticket to some exotic location. The plan? “Telecommute” from wherever you happen to be. Earn an American salary, but pay Third-World prices for food and shelter.

The digital nomad, location-independent lifestyle once seemed so impossible, exotic and unlikely that only a few people dared even attempt it. But now, a lot more people are doing it, and it seems like everyone else would like to. Could it be? Is the digital nomad lifestyle about to go “mainstream”?

I was asked to be interviewed last week by the producers of something called the Ideas Project, a Nokia-sponsored site that explores what the “big ideas” are for the future of communications. I could have talked about anything, but I chose to address what I think will be the single trend that will do the most to change how people work: The location-independent digital nomad trend…

A perfect storm of micro-trends are colliding before our very eyes to facilitate the lifestyle of traveling while working, and working while traveling. These include the usual suspects, such as the declining price of electronics and bandwidth and of an increasingly globalized economy. But they also include trends that don’t seem that obvious.

The biggest of these is that the technologies, products and services that digital nomads use to work while traveling are themselves becoming popular among everybody, even those who never travel…It will get to the point where the only difference between an ordinary white-collar worker and a digital nomad is an airplane ticket.

I love that line: “the only difference between an ordinary white-collar worker and a digital nomad is an airplane ticket.” Do you have any experiences with the digital nomad lifestyle, or do you know someone who does? What are your thoughts?

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m a fan of taking life sabbaticals, or career breaks. So it’s always nice to read about the positive experiences that other individuals have had in taking time off from their career, whether to travel or engage in some other worthwhile activity.

Michael Bontempi just wrote about his own career break and travel experiences for the Briefcase to Backpack site. Like pretty much everyone I know who has ever attempted this, he had an incredible experience, time to reflect on his life, and no problem finding a new job and resuming a career when he was back home. Here is an excerpt of what he had to say:

My career break gave me the opportunity to reflect on my previous 14 years of experience and helped me to reevaluate my career path and evaluate if I was on the right track. Ironically, putting our 9-month plan together started me on the decision path for my next role. It came very natural to me to orchestrate all the moving parts that would be required to enable me to enjoy my career break and ensure that our life back home was in order at the same time.

So as I started my career search at the beginning of 2008, the one frequent question that was on everyone’s mind was “how I would be able to explain my career break to a new employer?” To be honest, this was not something I was overly concerned about. I had decided that when asked, I would tell my story as it happened. To hide the truth or try to spin this time into something it wasn’t would be foolish. Surprisingly, most of the negative reaction to my career break decision came from the recruiters I worked with, and very little concern from the potential new employer. In today’s competitive market, some could view a career break as a handicap, while most see it as a differentiator…

For anyone that is considering a career break with hopes of returning to a career, you will inevitably have many doubts, concerns and questions. But at the end of the day, the choice to take a career break is not just about the travel - it’s about you. It’s about trying to reflect on all that you have accomplished and what you haven’t and determining if the current path you’re on will eventually put more in that “accomplished” category.

Check out his entire story, and the rest of the Briefcase to Backpack site.

So there’s finally a catchphrase for the growing number of people who try to stitch a living out of wandering from project to project. Marci Alboher wrote a book a while back and she has a blog about people who have slash/careers, or multiple vocations. But now Tina Brown has created a mini-media storm with an article about what she has dubbed “The Gig Economy.”

No one I know has a job anymore. They’ve got Gigs.

Gigs: a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces they try and stitch together to make what they refer to wryly as “the Nut”—the sum that allows them to hang on to the apartment, the health-care policy, the baby sitter, and the school fees.

Gigs: They’re all that’s standing between them and…what? The outer-outer boroughs? Eating what’s left of the 401(k)? Moving to Alaska? Out-and-out destitution?

To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What’s new is the way it’s hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.

Brown ended up doing an NPR interview about the topic, ABC News chimed in with tips for accidental freelancers, and before long almost everyone was writing about the gig economy. Newsweek had one of the more prominent stories, asking “are freelance and part-time gigs the future?”

In this economy, a job isn’t just a job: It’s a pastiche of part-time gigs, project contracts and fill-in freelance work…Some 2.5 million full-time jobs have evaporated in the last 13 months, contributing to what’s being called the “gig economy.” But there is a convergence of other, more developed trends at play as well. Tight-budgeted company managers long ago embraced outsourcing to only pay for what they can use. A new generation of workers has 24/7 connectivity, lacks corporate loyalty, and thinks like mavericks. Put them together and you get gigonomics.

Equally important in the Newsweek story, though, are the challenges and policy issues it raised. Let’s face it, our economy and our safety net are still a relic of the time when people went to work for one company and stayed there for an extended period of time.

In a freelance-based job market, talented, skilled and energetic people can still do great work and make good money. But those highly qualified workers who aren’t good at the business side of selling themselves, over and over, can suffer. Even connected, ambitious, talented giggers can hit slow periods, and that’s where the gigonomics start to pinch. “You have to bring in a project and then the project ends, and then you have to bring in another project,” says Challenger. “That can be a difficult time. It can make you doubt yourself when you might be good.”

And it isn’t just about feelings. The complete lack of a safety net for independent workers is the key policy challenge of the gigonomic era, says Horowitz, who received a prestigious MacArthur fellowship for her advocacy work in this area. Her organization is pressing President Obama to include relief for self-employed workers in his stimulus plan. She is lobbying for a savings system in which contingent workers could get some government-matching funds when they put rainy-day money away during fat times.

She would also like to see other policy initiatives aimed at the independent workforce, including more non-employer mechanisms for affordable group health insurance, flexible retirement plans, and tax breaks to address the additional Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by the self-employed.

Just wondering how many of you are part of the gig economy, and what are your thoughts on this topic?

Since I’ve long been an advocate of sabbaticals, I was intrigued to come across this article on the Brazen Careerist website. The piece is titled “10 Ways Generation Y Will Change the Workplace,” and sitting there at number four is - “We’ll Redefine Retirement.” How? Through a series of sabbaticals, or mini-retirements, throughout one’s lifetime.

Retirement is dead. It’s dead for a number of reasons, including the issues with social security and middle class America’s inability to save any money. But Gen Y will figure out how to save money to retire–we’re already demanding 401K’s and excellent benefits. However, we will re-invent retirement by taking multiple mini retirements instead of calling it quits a few years before its time to croak. Maybe in our late twenties we’ll take a few months just to travel the world. Then, as we approach parenthood and our kids grow up, we’ll take a year off to enjoy time with our family. Then we’ll return to work, refreshed and ready to go. When we hit 65, it will be the new 45 and we’ll have a solid 15 to 20 years left before we take our final, very brief, mini retirement. 

I’ve been seeing more press these days being devoted to the concept of taking a sabbatical from work. It’s an idea that particularly interests me, since my wife and I have taken two sabbaticals since getting married in 2001 - experiences that I chronicled in my book, Two Laps Around the World. So I thought I’d catch up on some of these press clippings and cover the topic a bit more frequently in this blog.

First, an article from the New York Times (”Sabbaticals Aren’t just for Academics Anymore”), which was published a while ago but provides a nice overview of the subject.

In an age of job hopping, a perk to reward loyalty — sabbaticals for those with five years or more on the job — is taking on increased importance.

Though the academic world initiated sabbatical programs, they have been embraced by the government and the private sector, including companies as varied as McDonald’s, Nike, Boston Consulting, Goldman Sachs and Silicon Graphics as well as law and accounting firms. Some companies restrict time off to educational forays and charitable projects, while others encourage everything from beachcombing, family time and travel. Leaves can be paid or unpaid and can last weeks or months…

Measuring return on investment is almost impossible, but companies with such plans seem as enthusiastic as any sabbatical taker. They discount fears that those taking leave will use the time to find other employment.

“A lot of times, people think it’s just for the employee, but it is a tremendous advantage that we get as a company,” said Richard Floersch, chief people officer and executive vice president for worldwide human resources at McDonald’s. “It’s re-energizing that lasts more than a day. Depending on what they do while they are gone, they come back even more skilled and talented than when they left.”

And, from a more recent Wall Street Journal story.

With constant travel and 60-hour weeks pushing him close to burnout, the veteran partner at Mercer, a major human-resource consultant, decided he needed a sabbatical.

Mr. Marcus pursued an elaborate self-improvement scheme and sharpened his professional focus during an eight-month break, which ended in November 2006. “I’m a better consultant today because I bring a more balanced perspective to my work,” he says…

A sabbatical can enhance your career, especially if you acquire valuable skills, experience and insights. Extended breaks allow for personal goals, such as travel, study or research…

Sabbaticals are attracting greater attention these days from the nation’s frazzled and disengaged workforce, according to Dan Clements, who co-wrote “Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple.” He took five in 15 years. About 16% of U.S. employers offered unpaid sabbaticals and 4% gave paid ones in 2007, the Society for Human Resource Management reports.

Hmm, stories in the New York Times AND the Wall Street Journal. There can’t be much more of a sign that this trend is getting noticed.

The world of work has evolved considerably in the past decade, and perhaps nowhere is this change more evident than in the mobility of workers, who keep finding new ways to move beyond the traditional office environment. It began when high speed internet access and teleconferencing technology enabled more people to work from home, at least for part of the time. But the ubiquity of laptops and the wireless internet has now irrevocably altered the concept of the office.

Most obviously, it has given workers the freedom to work not only from home, but also from coffee shops and other public locations. This topic was explored in a recent NY Times article that focused on the technology workers and entrepreneurs who gather regularly at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco.

As latte sippers pore over the latest draft of a business plan, bang out a little code or post to a blog, it is not hard to overhear snippets of dialogue with a decidedly capitalist bent: “We could make money off that,” and “Have you talked to them about a deal?”

For the Web 2.0 crowd creating businesses, as well as the post-Web 2.0 crowd looking for businesses to build, Ritual is the place to be. While it has not yet risen to the mythic proportions of Buck’s, the hangout in Woodside, Calif., for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, it is becoming the place to generate ideas, find staff members and troll for companies to finance.

” … when you go into Ritual, it seems they’re either writing code or writing a blog or creating something with a widget that will make money for them this week, and that’s really different from a lot of the other places.” …

Indeed, San Francisco cafes have emerged as the new office of choice for many small start-ups. Atlas Cafe, also in the eclectic Mission District, is one, and Coffee to the People in the Haight is another. But Ritual, located between a heating repair shop and a video store, is perhaps the most popular. … Flickr, the popular photo sharing site, held weekly meetings there before it was bought by Yahoo. And Rubyred Labs, a Web design shop, had its debut party there.

Even more intriguing, though, are some of the ways in which the office has morphed into new forms. One example of this is the movement toward coworking, in which various individuals rent out desks in an office so they can have the camaraderie of coworkers while retaining their independence. This trend was explored recently in a different story.

Contemplating his career path a couple of years ago, a young computer programmer named Brad Neuberg faced a modern predicament. “It seemed I could either have a job, which would give me structure and community,” he said, “or I could be freelance and have freedom and independence. Why couldn’t I have both?”

As someone used to hacking out solutions, Mr. Neuberg took action. He created a word — coworking, eliminating the hyphen — and rented space in a building, starting a movement.

While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas…

Coworking sites are up and running from Argentina to Australia and many places in between, although a wiki site on coworking shows that most are in the United States…The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers teaming up to rent studio space…

Coworking comes in many flavors. The Hat Factory in San Francisco is a live-work loft that’s home to three technology workers who open up during the day to other people. Some companies, like Citizen Agency, a San Francisco Internet consulting firm that has done the most to evangelize coworking, have an open-door policy, in which people rent desks but others are free to drop in and use the Wi-Fi or the conference room.

Some companies rent out desks to the nomadic workers, hoping some of their Internet mojo will rub off. Yet others have started coworking spaces as businesses unto themselves, like a community version of the corporate business centers operated by the Regus Group.

Tara Hunt, a co-owner of Citizen Agency, which calls its office Citizen Space, has listed (in a blog, of course) some principles of coworking. They include collaboration, openness, community, sustainability and accessibility. Many of the ideas come from the open-source software movement, in which people share their work freely with little regard for financial gain. Taking a nod from that movement, the people involved in coworking share their experiences and ideas on a Web site, coworking.pbwiki.com.

Now that corporations recognize not only the benefits of international experience but also a real need for managers to have a broad global perspective, a wide array of programs are popping into existence in order to meet these training needs. One of the more interesting programs that I’ve heard about was just profiled in the NY Times. IBM is actually sending budding managers abroad to work as volunteers in various business-related projects.

In July, a team of 8 to 10 I.B.M. employees will travel to Ghana to help tiny businesses make their operations more professional. Another team will help entrepreneurs seek microloans in Turkey, while yet another will create training programs on information technology in Vietnam.

The projects, which were devised by I.B.M.’s citizenship group and are being coordinated through nonprofit organizations, have all the trappings of corporate philanthropy. But that is not why they were created, or how they are being used.

“This is a management development exercise for high-potential people at I.B.M.,” said Randy MacDonald, senior vice president for human resources.

What does I.B.M. hope to gain from sending these employees on volunteer missions abroad? Quite a lot, actually.

“As a development tool, this is a four-for-one,” said Allan R. Cohen, dean of the Olin Graduate School at Babson College, near Boston. “It’s stretching to work in another culture, to work in a nonprofit where the measurement of accomplishment isn’t clear, to take a sabbatical from your everyday routine and to learn to accomplish things when you can’t just bark orders.”

Indeed, Paul Ingram, a management professor at the Columbia Business School, is planning a similar program for this fall, in which executives attending the school’s Senior Executive Program will work with nonprofit groups in New York. Because 80 percent of the students are not from the United States, the New York location is outside their comfort zone.

“The fact that you are an excellent programmer or salesman, or can lead a project in your own area and culture, doesn’t mean you can be a great leader outside of your technical or cultural expertise,” he said.

That is I.B.M.’s logic as well. The company views the Service Corps as a way to learn how well employees work with strangers, in strange lands, on unfamiliar projects.

It is one of our great challenges, particularly for Americans with little vacation time — creating time in our lives to travel.  Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding, has a variety of ideas for individuals who are determined to hit the road.

Short of simply asking for more vacation time, many people negotiate long-term leaves of absence or sabbaticals (paid or unpaid, depending upon the situation) to enable travel.  Others fine-tune their careers so that they are doing seasonal or contract work, which frees them up to travel between work engagements.  Still others will quit a job and then work a long-term travel stint into their life before accepting a new job.

With the advent of new communication technologies it has also become possible to adopt what has been called a “global mobility lifestyle” - which allows you to redesign your work life in such a way that it can mix in with extended travel.

He focused on the latter possibility in a recent interview he conducted with Tim Ferriss, author of the upcoming book, The 4-Hour Workweek.  Some highlights:

What are the biggest misconceptions people have about work, and making time for travel?

The biggest misconception about work is that you have to spend most of your life doing it. 

I’ve spent the last four years traveling through more than 25 countries interviewing people who have automated income or escaped the office, often without quitting their jobs.  Some of them negotiate “working from the home office” while actually trekking in Africa or touring in Europe, satellite phones and Quad-band Treos in hand. Others create simple virtual businesses that enable them to quit the grind and take one-to-three-month “mini-retirements” a few times per year…

Once you control the most valuable currencies in the digital age - mobility and time - $40,000 can get you more luxury lifestyle than a $500,000 per year investment banker who can’t escape the office.

Many people often can’t stop thinking about work minutiae, even when they’re far away from the traditional office setting.  How do you get your mind, and not just your body, out of the office?

In the experience of those I’ve interviewed, it takes two to three months just to unplug from work routines and become aware of how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.  Can you have a two-hour dinner with Spanish friends without getting anxious?  Can you get accustomed to a small town where all businesses take a siesta for two hours in the afternoon? If not, you need to ask: why?

Learn to slow down.  If you create a mobile lifestyle, whether through a remote work arrangement or entrepreneurship, escaping the “too-weak vacation” world is as simple as using a few common technologies and believing it can be done.

I was intrigued by a recent article I came across that described the cafe culture of New York City.  Not the culture that surrounds the crowded Starbucks on every corner, but the life of the European-style cafes where creative professionals gather and network most mornings over coffee or breakfast.

Such are the benefits of belonging to a Manhattan social tribe (or several tribes) whose members regularly languish for an hour or two on weekday mornings at European-style cafes. Drawn from the self-employed ranks of late-rising professions like fashion, art, publicity and Web publishing, these affluent breakfast clubbers avoid Starbucks …

Unlike the “power breakfast,” that well-documented institution that plays out among corporate executives at the Regency and Four Seasons hotels, members of the late-morning breakfast tribe, who gather from 9 to 11, don’t have to put in an early appearance at an office. But don’t be fooled by the casual vibe and the late hour. These breakfast clubbers are not slackers. …

Eventually the caffeine takes effect, and the late-morning breakfast clubbers must move on to start the day. They head to the home office, or the film set, or the design studio.  “Once 11:30 hits, the energy shifts in the city,” Ms. Erickson said.

The article made me reflect on the cafe life in other cities around the world.  In fact, on cafe culture in general. There is an interesting article on wikipedia about the history of the coffeehouse.  If you want to read further, you can also linger over a few other stories that I found, about the cafe culture in such cities as Paris, Vienna, Rome, Buenos Aires and Hanoi.

Just make sure to pour yourself a fresh cup of java or, better yet, read the articles over a wireless connection at your favorite neighborhood cafe.

American workers and employers are beginning to recognize the benefits of having and using vacation time.  Part of this trend is driven by younger workers who value quality of life issues and a balance between work and personal time, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor. Even so, the U.S. work culture is quite a bit different than that of European countries when it comes to taking time off.

Even if American workers took all of their allotted time off, they would still lag far behind their European counterparts. The average number of paid vacation days for someone in the US who had worked for a year in 2005 was 8.9, says Carroll Lachnit, executive editor of Workforce Management magazine. The statutory minimum vacation in the European Union is 21.3 days a year. The US has no statutory minimum.

Professor Ciulla observed firsthand the differences in attitudes between Europeans and Americans when she attended a recent conference in France hosted by an American company with overseas operations.

“The French refused to come that Friday because it was their bank holiday,” she says. “When the French have a day off, they have a day off, no matter what.”

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep or on a silent retreat for the past month hasn’t been able to avoid the protests and debates over the immigration issue in the U.S., particularly as it relates to immigration from Mexico.  But what is less talked about is traffic that goes in the other direction.  Mexico has long been a destination of choice for some retirees and other expatriates, of course, and Tony Cohan wrote a book a few years ago about his own experiences in that regard.

Now, here is an article that discusses the benefits of being able to telecommute from Mexico.  And a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post goes even further, by suggesting that continued integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies would mean not only Mexicans heading north, but increasing numbers of Americans being drawn to Mexico.

Almost one-quarter of U.S. businesses offer some form of paid or unpaid sabbaticals to their employees, and many companies are finding that it can be a valuable tool for both rewarding loyalty and helping employees to recharge.

I can personally attest that sabbaticals are a great idea. Lisa and I took our first round-the-world trip because she was able to get a sabbatical approved by her employer in Massachusetts. When it was over, she returned to her job and was a happy and productive employee for several more years, finally changing jobs only because she had a chance to move back to her home state.  Our experience was so positive, in fact, that when we found ourselves with another window of opportunity during a cross-country move in 2005, we decided to travel for several more months.  You can read about our 2005 journey in a blog I published during the trip.