
If you can’t justify a vacation, make it a bleisure trip.
What’s happening? Women entrepreneurs are embracing the “bleisure” trend. Bleisure Living ®, a mash-up of business and leisure, encourages go-getters to take time for themselves. People are extending business trips for exploration and calm and they’re working more moments of relaxation into their work travel schedules.
Why should you care? Entrepreneur reports that “vacations have been shown to lead to significantly higher performance upon return to the job,” but how many of us are really taking the time off we need? With 658 million vacation days going to waste in 2015 alone, it’s not a stretch to assume your last break feels like a million years ago. As a founder, your schedule may not leave much time for lounging on the beach, but there’s another solution: stretching work travel to serve your personal life too.
Who’s leading? Nancy A. Shenker, founder of theONswitch marketing, publisher of sheBOOM, and author of Embrace the Machine: 111 Ways AI Will Change Your Marketing Job, is a veritable expert at being on the move. She just launched a new online community called Bleisure Living, where she advocates two main strategies for making the most of business travel: either you can spend a day or two post-meetings and conferences exploring your destination, or you can seamlessly integrate leisure into your free time while traveling. Shenker’s philosophy is simple: take care of yourself and “Don’t apologize. Don’t rationalize.” Read more tips here.
What can you do? Plan out your bleisure travel for each month the same way you make business plans! Attend a conference in a place you’ve always wanted to visit. Or, if your schedule is really packed, at least try to free up an hour for a spa treatment or catch-up session with a local friend.