Why I'm Staying Home This May Day Holiday (And Actually Looking Forward to It)

The May Day holiday announcement dropped: 4 days off. My social media already shows two types of people—those booking flights and hotels, and those quietly checking their overtime pay calculators.

I’m not here to convince you to stay home or travel. I just want to share my honest experience of choosing staycation for every long holiday—and it’s genuinely been great. Not被迫宅, but actively choosing to be home.

Here’s the counterintuitive observation first: 4 days of quality time at home can match the happiness index of a trip out. The前提 is knowing how to plan it.

Priority number one: turn off work notifications on your phone. This is 100x more important than booking flights. If you’re still handling work messages during your holiday, going out feels exhausting and staying home feels like failure. True放空, and you’ll come back refreshed.

Priority number two: make a “things I’ve been wanting to do” list. Just 3 items. For me, every holiday includes: actually organizing the closet (not just moving piles from A to B), finishing a book I bought months ago and never opened, and perfecting one recipe I’ve been putting off.

Priority number three: rearrange your living space. Even just moving furniture to a different spot creates a completely new feel. Last May Day I moved my desk from the bedroom to a corner of the living room. That week, the new atmosphere actually boosted my productivity.

One hard lesson: don’t spend the first day binge-watching until 3am. Destroy your sleep schedule on day one, and you’ll spend the rest of the holiday paying off that debt. Set a bottom line—like no screens after midnight—and you’ll actually enjoy the following days.

Staycations aren’t the choice of someone who “couldn’t make it work.” They’re a different way to experience a holiday. Give it a try—you might fall in love with this approach.