Taking Time Off Shouldn’t Feel Like Falling Behind.
Updated: 20 hours ago
I haven’t posted anything in a couple of weeks. Normally, I might look at that gap and think, I really need to get something posted, but lately, I’ve been thinking about something we talk about all the time in HR but don’t always practice very well ourselves: Taking time off.
There is always something else that could be done, another email to answer, another project to finish, another deadline coming, another task sitting on the list. When you care about your work, stepping away can sometimes feel less like rest and more like falling behind, but maybe we need to rethink that. Rest isn't the opposite of productivity; recovery is part of our ability to keep being productive.
There Is Actually Research Behind Taking a Vacation
We tend to think of vacation as a perk but research suggests we should also think about it as an opportunity for recovery. A 2025 meta-analysis examining 32 studies on vacations and employee well-being found that vacations have meaningful positive effects on employee well-being and that those benefits may last longer after returning to work than earlier research had suggested. The researchers also found that psychological detachment from work and physical activity during vacation were particularly beneficial recovery experiences.
That's an important distinction.
Simply being away from the office isn't necessarily the same thing as recovering from work.
You can be physically sitting beside a lake while mentally sitting at your desk. If we're checking email, responding to Teams messages, thinking about the problem waiting for us Monday morning, or wondering what's happening without us, we may technically be on vacation without ever really leaving work. That concept has a name in organizational psychology: psychological detachment from work, and it matters.
Our Brains Need a Chance to Leave Work Too
One of the things I find interesting about the research on recovery is that it isn't simply about whether you went somewhere, it's about whether you actually disconnected. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology examined leader support for employee recovery. Researchers looked at things like a leader's empathy toward recovery, respect for work/nonwork boundaries, and role modeling. They found that respecting boundaries was positively associated with employees' ability to psychologically detach from work. Psychological detachment, in turn, was associated with lower emotional exhaustion and a higher state of recovery the following morning.
In other words: Sometimes the most productive thing you can do tonight is stop working--that's not laziness, that's recovery.
PTO Is a Benefit, Not a Test of Commitment
We spend a lot of time in HR creating PTO policies, tracking leave balances, talking about work-life balance, and reminding employees to take care of themselves but there's an important difference between having a PTO policy and having a culture where people feel comfortable using PTO.
An employee can have three weeks of vacation available on paper and still feel like they can't take it. What happens when someone requests time off? Do we say:"Absolutely. Have a great trip." or does the employee hear:
"That week is going to be really difficult..."
"Who's going to cover your work?"
"Do you have to take the whole week?"
Sometimes no one has to actually tell employees that taking PTO is discouraged, culture can communicate that message all by itself.
If taking vacation means spending the week before working twice as hard, checking email throughout the trip, and returning to a mountain of untouched work, employees may eventually decide that taking time off isn't worth the trouble and that is a workload and culture problem, not a PTO-policy problem.
Leaders Need Time Off Too
This is one of the situations where leadership matters. Leaders are responsible for encouraging employees to take time off, but they also have to give themselves permission to do the same, and sometimes that's harder. For business owners, executives, managers, HR professionals, and anyone who feels deeply responsible for their organization, stepping away can be uncomfortable.
We tell ourselves: "They might need me", "It will just be easier if I answer this myself","I'll just check my email once", "This will only take five minutes" and suddenly we're on vacation...working. The leadership research is particularly useful here because it specifically identifies role modeling as part of leader support for recovery, alongside empathy and respecting boundaries. Employees pay attention to what leaders actually do so if a leader tells employees:
"I really want you to use your PTO."
But that same leader never takes vacation, sends emails at midnight, responds to messages while supposedly out of the office, and apologizes for taking a day off...what message are employees really receiving? Probably not the one written in the handbook.
Taking Time Off Can Also Be a Leadership Exercise
I think there's another side of vacation that we don't talk about enough- stepping away requires us to trust other people.
A strong organization shouldn't depend on one person being available every day of the year.
Taking time off forces us to ask some really healthy organizational questions:
Does someone else know how to do this?
Have I documented the process?
Have I delegated appropriately?
Does my team know what decisions they can make without me?
Have I unintentionally become the bottleneck?
Can this organization function if I'm unavailable for a week?
Those aren't just vacation questions- those are succession planning, knowledge transfer, cross-training, and leadership-development questions and I've become increasingly passionate about that idea. If everything stops because one person leaves for a week, the solution probably isn't for that person to stop taking vacations, the solution is to build a stronger organization.
Maybe We Need Smaller Breaks Too
Time off doesn't necessarily have to mean one big annual vacation. Recent discussion in the occupational-health literature has also highlighted the potential value of more frequent opportunities for recovery, rather than relying exclusively on occasional long breaks. A 2025 editorial reviewing vacation research argued that more frequent vacations may help sustain well-being and recovery over time. That idea makes sense to me- maybe it's a week-long vacation, maybe it's a three-day weekend, maybe it's an afternoon spent hiking, fishing, gardening, reading, or doing absolutely nothing productive and sometimes it's simply closing the laptop at the end of the day and letting work be tomorrow's problem. Recovery doesn't have to be elaborate to count.
The Work Will Still Be There
That's something I have to remind myself too. There will always be another email, another client need, another project, another deadline, another blog post I meant to write. Work has an incredible ability to refill whatever space we give it, so yes, I haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks. Instead of feeling guilty about that, I'm choosing to see the gap a little differently. Maybe being quiet for a couple of weeks doesn't mean I've fallen behind, maybe sometimes we just need to step away to be present somewhere else, to rest, to reconnect, to let our brains think about something completely unrelated to work and then come back.
Taking care of ourselves isn't something we should only do after we're burned out. Recovery should be part of how we prevent getting there in the first place.
So take the vacation, use the PTO, add the out-of-office message, trust your team, close the laptop. If you're a leader, remember that taking time off isn't just something you're allowed to do, It may also be one of the ways you show everyone else that they're allowed to do it too. The work will still be there when you get back, hopefully, you'll return a little more ready for it.
If you need more reading about rest and time off here are my references:
Grant & Buchanan, I Need a Vacation: A Meta-Analysis of Vacation and Employee Well-Being (2025). The meta-analysis examined 32 studies and found positive effects of vacation on employee well-being, while identifying psychological detachment and physical activity as particularly beneficial recovery experiences.https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-70561-001
Sonnentag, Kark & Venz, Leader Support for Recovery: A Multi-Level Approach to Employee Psychological Detachment from Work, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2024). The study examined 152 employees and found links among leaders' respect for boundaries, psychological detachment, lower emotional exhaustion, and morning recovery.https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-16227-001
Giridharan & Pandiyan, Maximizing Recovery: The Superiority of Frequent Vacations for Well-Being and Performance (2025), an editorial discussing research supporting regular recovery opportunities and vacation practices. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40786441/
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