Why Taking a Holiday Can Feel Like Another Workplace Deadline
The week before a holiday rarely feels restful. Deadlines move forward, the task list expands and working days get longer. By the time the out-of-office message goes on, many people are exhausted.
Annual leave is supposed to provide a break from work. Instead, it can feel like something that must be prepared for, earned and repaid.
Summer can also intensify existing work pressure. Several colleagues may take leave at once, leaving smaller teams to absorb additional work, while parents may also be juggling work with school holidays and childcare.
People can feel guilty about adding to colleagues’ workloads, particularly when teams are already stretched.
People can therefore spend the days before annual leave working at precisely the intensity from which they need a break, before packing the laptop ‘just in case’.
Being away is not always the same as switching off
Physical distance from work does not necessarily create mental distance. Psychological detachment means being mentally, as well as physically, away from work.
A 2025 meta-analysis of 32 studies found that switching off was among the experiences most strongly associated with improvements in wellbeing during and after a holiday.
Yet Mental Health UK’s 2025 Burnout Report found that only 42 per cent of workers agreed that they could switch off from work when they needed to.
Remaining partly available can keep work active in the mind, even when someone is officially on leave. Responsiveness may be confused with commitment, while employees may feel personally responsible for maintaining continuity during their absence.
Workplace arrangements can make switching off more difficult too. Important knowledge may be concentrated in one person and teams may lack the capacity to cover one another’s work. Employees may also know that every unfinished task will still be waiting when they return.
Complete disconnection may not be possible for everyone. But there is a significant difference between agreeing a limited exception and remaining vaguely available throughout the break.
If contact is necessary, people should know what counts as genuinely urgent, who will make contact and how. Without those boundaries, employees can feel mentally on call even when no message arrives.
Giving a holiday the best chance to be restorative
Annual leave is often expected to do too much: to undo weeks or months of pressure and restore energy, concentration and perspective within a few days.
But the same meta-analysis found that holidays can significantly improve employee wellbeing, with benefits continuing after people return to work.
The question is what will give people the best possible chance to step away, slow down and return with greater capacity? This requires individual preparation, but it also depends on how leave is managed by the organisation.
Work can be prioritised well in advance, with a realistic decision about what genuinely must be completed before leave begins. Some work may need to be reassigned, moved or allowed to wait.
A useful handover should focus on decisions, responsibilities and the location of essential information, rather than attempting to document every detail.
Any need for contact should be agreed clearly rather than left open-ended. Where practical, work applications can be removed from personal devices and equipment left at home.
What leaders can do
Leaders can make annual leave easier to take by planning cover, reviewing priorities and ensuring that an employee is not expected to compress the same workload into fewer days.
Clear messages matter too: people should know that taking their full entitlement is encouraged and that, unless otherwise agreed, they are not expected to monitor messages or respond while away.
The behaviour of senior colleagues reinforces that message. Managers who take their own leave, avoid working during it and respect other people’s time away demonstrate that switching off is accepted rather than something for which employees must quietly compensate.
This also means looking beyond the individual absence. If a team cannot function without one person, or each holiday creates an unmanageable backlog, the underlying issue may be workload, cover or how knowledge is shared.
Addressing those pressures makes leave easier to take and strengthens the team throughout the year.
The return matters too. Leaving space before meetings and deadlines resume allows someone to review what has changed, establish priorities and return to work with greater focus.
Done well, annual leave gives people more than a pause in their workload.
As Matt Adamson, Career Coach at 10Eighty puts it, “On an aircraft, we are told to put on our own oxygen mask before helping others – this can feel perverse but, we are far more useful when we are functioning properly. Annual leave should work in the same way. Genuine rest restores our energy, judgement and perspective, enabling us to return not only feeling better, but performing better. Recovery is not time away from performance; it is what makes sustainable performance possible.”
A holiday cannot undo months of pressure on its own. But with clearer boundaries, realistic workloads and time to adjust, it has a far better chance of being genuinely restorative than feeling like another performance target.
The aim is to create a working culture in which people can switch off while they are away, without paying a price for taking that break.
Why do we treat recovery as something to be earned after the work is finished, when the work is never entirely finished?
The LinkedIn Live session, Recovery Is Not a Reward – It’s a Performance Strategy, will explore why pushing through can undermine performance and why recovery matters to creativity, judgement and long-term capacity.
ZenEighty supports employee wellbeing through personalised coaching, workshops and programmes covering areas including stress, resilience, work–life balance and healthy boundaries.
