Should you work (a little) on your holiday?

AMERICAN OFFICE workers of an envious disposition must avoid emailing colleagues in Europe this month. The inevitable “try me again in September” automatic rejoinder is unlikely to improve the mood of those spending most of their summer toiling. Perhaps one consolation is the knowledge that holidays are not what they used to be. Rare is the employee who leaves all their work behind these days. Plenty of people will at least furtively scroll through emails while on the beach. Everyone has occasionally shirked work. Now many workers are shirking holidays, too.In the olden days, office life used to be binary. Establishing whether Bob from accounting was on annual leave was as simple as checking whether he was at his desk. Then BlackBerrys—the executive status symbol of the early 2000s—were granted to those who implicitly agreed to use them outside office hours.