Work From…Anywhere? Tips From Travellers Who Do ‘Workcations’ Right
Want to make your time off go further? Take advantage of remote work to set up in a holiday location for a week, even a month. The risk: missing the point of travelling in the first place.
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ASHLEY SCHWARTAU escaped to a Mexican beach town just two weeks after starting a new job for a Chicago-based insurance company. It’s not that Schwartau, 38, is a late-blooming spring breaker. She and her husband both work remotely, so when winter arrived at home in Nashville, Tenn., the pair decided to clock in from a vacation rental with a pool in Playa del Carmen.
For the next four weeks, the couple took calls from their temporary home, while their 4-year-old son attended a bilingual preschool whose $350 monthly tuition would be implausible back in Nashville. After hours, the trio played at the nearby beach, lounged poolside or grazed at neighbourhood taco stands. Following a weeklong-vacation chaser at month’s end, they returned to Tennessee restored. “It’s hard for working parents to truly find moments of relaxation, and that was one of the most relaxing trips we’ve ever taken,” said Schwartau, who documented the trip on her blog to inspire others looking to expand their own definitions of remote work.
Unlike some full-time “digital nomads”—who skew young, male and child-free—Schwartau has no plans to permanently swap home life for stints in Lisbon or Bali. Instead, Schwartau used her hybrid “workcation” to capitalise on a remote-friendly job and temporarily set up shop away from home’s routines and responsibilities.
The trip also let her save some paid time off while still traveling, a strategy that appeals to workers in the U.S., where the average private-sector job affords just 11 days off after a year. With employers increasingly offering flexible work options, workcations seem to be a pandemic-accelerated trend with staying power. A 2023 study by Deloitte showed that one in five travellers planned to do some work on their primary summer trips, with many using flexible policies to eke out additional time away.
Still, obstacles abound. Jet lag can sap work output, sand will destroy your computer and dutifully clocking hours a block from a beach invites intense FOMO. It takes finesse to make workcations work—here’s how to pull one off.
Get in the (time) zone
Going too far afield—or heading in the wrong direction—can tug routines out of alignment. Dan Hammel of Benicia, Calif., works for a tech concern that follows Central time and offers staffers two annual work-from-anywhere weeks. Last fall, Hammel spent one off-kilter week working from the Italian city of Bologna. “My hours in Europe were probably about 4 p.m. to midnight,” he said of the need to align with his stateside colleagues’ workdays. After days spent touring nearby Modena and Parma with his wife, Hammel found the schedule challenging. “I like to be in bed around 10,” said Hammel, 45.
To avoid red-eye marathons, follow your natural sleep pattern to the optimal time zone. For Hammel, that meant Maui, where he worked remotely in May. “I would get up at 5 a.m. and would be done around noon,” he said. “We would have the whole rest of the day to nap, relax for a little bit after my workday, hit the beach, go to dinner.”
Make space
Remote work might conjure Instagram shots of laptops lolling on beach chairs, but such scenes don’t translate to meaningful productivity. Deloitte found that more than half of all travelers look for work-friendly spaces when booking accommodation. William DeSousa, 73, a public-relations professional from Osterville, Mass., craves more space than hotel rooms offer: He’s a villa guy.
For 16 years, he’s spent a month working from Greece with his husband and has learned that walls do wonders. “We both need to be on phones, or be on Zoom calls,” he said. “I think separate workspaces work best for couples.” This year, the pair will enjoy the beach-and-taverna circuit while clocking in from villas in Santorini and Crete.
Other travellers opt for hotels—such as Mama Shelter Shoreditch London and the Hoxton Chicago—with dedicated co-working areas and brisk internet. Whatever you decide, ask for bandwidth details before booking: The website Global Nomad Guide, which advises remote workers, recommends download speeds of at least 50 Mbps.
Log off
Many remote workers are loath to shut devices down, which can lead to post-workcation regrets. Commit in advance to logging off, said Jaime Kurtz, professor of psychology at James Madison University and author of “The Happy Traveler: Unpacking the Secrets of Better Vacations.” Tell yourself, “‘I’m going to work this many hours a day, and then I will go out and take advantage of the place,’” Kurtz said. She suggested travellers seek experiences that sideline devices completely, such as riding a bike or joining a food tour.
And while remote work can help PTO go farther, don’t mistake working getaways for more truly replenishing vacations. That’s why many workcationers, including Schwartau and Hammel, follow remote stints with actual time off, using working trips as a launchpad for dedicated travel time.
Jessica de Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who studies the blurring frontiers between work and leisure time, considers true disconnection essential to thriving. A request for comment for this story prompted an out-of-office message, suggesting de Bloom lives by her own findings. “I am currently enjoying a vacation,” the auto-response read. “I choose not to work and check my emails, because research showed that working during holidays can be detrimental for my health.”
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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