How often do you bring work with you on holiday? You take the time off and are physically away from your desk, yet work comes along with you somewhere in the back of your mind. Maybe you find yourself mentally drafting emails, reaching for your phone more than you intend to or find yourself struggling to sleep because you're running through something that was left unfinished before you went.
For most people, this experience gets attributed to the wrong cause. They tell themselves they are bad at switching off, or that their job is too demanding to step away from properly, or that this is just what it's like when you work at a certain level. In my experience, none of those things is usually the reason.
When you leave work with unresolved tasks, your brain does not put them on pause. Instead, you keep thinking about those incomplete items in the background, and they end up surfacing at inconvenient moments (because that is what brains do with unfinished business). Psychologists refer to this as the Zeigarnik effect, which describes our tendency to ruminate on incomplete tasks far more than completed ones.
This means that the anxiety or worry you feel on a break is not random or a character flaw; it is your brain's response to having left things open at work. Whether that'sa decision that was left hanging, a conversation that needed to happen before you went but didn't, or a vague sense that something might go wrong while you are away and nobody will know what to do about it, these are legitimate concerns that your brain will keep raising until they are resolved.
In other words, the problem is not that you took time off work but that you left without closing enough of those loops beforehand.
The most common approach to preparing for time off is to work harder in the days leading up to leaving. People stay late, skip lunch, and try to clear as much of the backlog as possible before the deadline of their last day. This is understandable, but the result is that you leave exhausted, with a brain still running at full speed and a task list that is only marginally shorter than it was at the start of the week.
Working harder before you go is not the same as preparing properly. Preparation is not about volume; it is about decisions. Instead of rushing through your task list, take some time to review your workload and make deliberate choices about what needs to be finished before you leave, what can wait until you return, what someone else can handle in your absence, and what can be dropped entirely because it has lost its relevance. You could spend a few extra minutes setting up a handover that gives your colleagues what they need in your absence, rather than an out-of-office that tells people you are away without helping them move forward.
Finally, my personal favourite is planning what you want to focus on when you return before you log out for your break, so that your first week back has some structure rather than being determined entirely by whatever landed in your inbox while you were gone.
When these things are in place, your brain gets the signal it needs to disengage because nothing remains unresolved that requires your attention. Although not everything on your list might be complete, there is a clear plan about how things will move forward - and that's enough.
Time off is not a nice-to-have. Rest is a core part of performing well over a sustained period, and the research has consistently found that people who take proper breaks are more focused, more creative and more effective when they return than those who stay connected. The benefit of the break is lost almost entirely if you spend it anxious about work or if your first week back undoes the recovery before it has had a chance to take effect.
The good news is that none of this requires a dramatic change to how you work. It just requires a different kind of preparation that starts a little earlier than most people think about it and focuses on making decisions rather than just doing more.
If you would like a step-by-step framework for doing exactly that, from one month before you leave to your last day at your desk, the Better Workday Pre-Holiday Plan walks you through the whole process.