In May, CareerBuilder came out with a survey that said 25 percent of all workers plan to stay in touch with work via e-mail while they are on vacation this year. The survey also noted that this trend is growing because the number was only 20 percent last year, and that 10 percent of all workers were expected to stay in touch while taking time off.

I think this is a troubling trend, and as I said in May, good managers know that it is important to encourage workers to take their allotted time off.  Helping your staff stay refreshed and rejuvenated is just as important as anything else you do.

Well, here’s one guy who proves my point: columnist Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury News. Mike recently went on vacation and made a personal pledge to himself to “check out from work without checking in. Taking a cue from Stanford law professor and cybercelebrity Lawrence Lessig, I pledged to steer clear of my e-mail in-box while reconnecting with my extended and far-flung family in the woods of Wisconsin.”

Mike’s story is a worthwhile read, especially for those of you who (like me) can’t seem to ever really get away from work no matter how hard you try. But there is a trade-off. “I’m paying now for my ‘no e-mail on vacation’ pledge,” Cassidy writes. “But it was so worth it…. And you know what? The world didn’t end. The Mercury News published without me. Colleagues welcomed me back with no apparent hard feelings over my slow response to e-mail that must have seemed very important at the time.”

And Cassidy also makes another important point. Way too much of the e-mail we deal with each day is pure, unadulterated crap that doesn’t really help us to do our jobs any better. “Since my return,” he writes, “I’ve scanned the first few lines of the e-mail that I let pile up. Two-thirds of it is junk. The rest ranges from interesting to marginally so.”

The art of managing people frequently involves getting them to do something they aren’t inclined to do on their own. All too often, that includes getting them to take the time to unplug, disconnect and recharge themselves. Bob Nardelli tried to do this by demanding that Chrysler workers take time off, and as ham-handed and poorly communicated as his edict was, embedded in it was the notion that workers need to take some time for themselves when they are not worrying about their job.

A better idea is IBM’s vacations-on-demand approach , under which workers take off whenever they want for as long as they want as long as they get their work done. Yes, this approach won’t work for everyone and every business either, but it does a whole lot more to encourage people to get away and recharge than the Chrysler edict does.

Are you planning to get away this summer? Are you going to completely unplug and get away, or will you be peeking at e-mail while away? I’d love to hear what you are planning, either in a comment at the bottom of this post or in an e-mail to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I’m guessing that a lot of you would like to take the Mike Cassidy approach, but like Mike, you may be reluctant to completely go cold turkey during your getaway.