The case for taking more time off, especially when you’re the boss

I'm writing this in the final week of a run that started with three weeks fully off and has moved into three weeks working part time. When I was an employed leader, I always took my full holiday allocation and insisted my teams did too, and I genuinely believed I understood why that mattered. Now that I run my own business, I take eleven weeks off a year, and it's non negotiable, and I understand the why on a completely different level than I did back then.

It isn't because I'm lazy, and it isn't really about rest in the simple sense either. It's because I'm more than just my work. I'm also a mum, a wife, a friend, a daughter and an adventurer, and I want to actually experience all of that rather than let one part of my life swallow up the rest. That's easy to say and much harder to protect, especially when you're the person who built the thing you're stepping away from.

There's a piece of research I keep coming back to that explains why simply being away from the office isn't the same as actually recovering. Sonnentag and Fritz's work on recovery experiences found that genuine psychological detachment, properly disengaging your mind from work rather than just your body, is one of the most important mechanisms for restoring energy and judgement. There's a well known finding sitting underneath that, that people who check email or stay mentally engaged with work problems during time off get little to no restorative benefit at all. You can be sat somewhere beautiful and still not actually be resting, because your mind never left the building.

I got a live example of that this holiday, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. A small property matter and an unexpected charge on a completion statement landed in the middle of my third week off, and within minutes I'd gone from this needs checking to properly catastrophising. That was uncomfortable at the time, but it taught me something useful, which is that even on holiday, even fully detached from work, I can still be triggered. The old patterns don't disappear just because you've booked the time off. What's changed is how quickly I find my way back to clear thinking, and that recovery speed is, I think, one of the more honest signs that the rest is actually working.

There's a leadership specific piece to this too, which matters if you're running a business rather than just working in one. Research on leader detachment has found that a leader's own ability to switch off directly predicts whether their team feels able to do the same. If you're the founder who's still visibly online at ten at night, still firing off messages over a long weekend, you're setting the standard for what's actually allowed, whatever the holiday policy says on paper. Taking my full time off isn't just something I do for myself. It's permission for everyone in my business to do the same, and I'd rather model that than just say it in a values statement nobody reads.

Then there's the more practical cost of not doing this, which is decision fatigue. There's a solid and long standing evidence base showing that judgement measurably degrades across a sustained run of decisions and recovers with proper rest, which is a fairly unglamorous way of saying that the version of you making calls in week three of an unbroken run is simply not thinking as clearly as the version of you in week one, however capable you are. Add to that what's known about sustained disengagement allowing the brain to properly reset, something that seems to need real length rather than a long weekend, and the case for proper time off stops being a nice to have and starts looking more like basic maintenance for the instrument you're actually running the business with.

None of this means switching off altogether is the goal, because I don't think it is. The same drive that makes someone build something worth building is often exactly what makes stepping away feel uncomfortable, almost like abandoning it rather than looking after it. I love my work. I'm genuinely passionate about it, and there is enormous good that comes from being fully on, fully immersed, properly stretched by something that matters to you. The skill isn't choosing between being on and being off. It's knowing which one the moment calls for, and trusting yourself enough to actually act on that, rather than defaulting to on because it feels safer or more virtuous.

What I'm left with, heading into my final few days before getting properly stuck back in, is how much calmer and more creative I've felt these past weeks, and how ready I now feel to return to the work I love. I also know that none of this works if I only preach it and don't practise it myself, so this is me practising it, in public, including the bit where I got it wrong for an hour over a completion statement.

If you're a founder or a leader reading this end of August, wondering whether you can really justify stepping properly away, I'd ask you the same question I had to ask myself. What would it actually cost you to find out?

Nicola Gunstone is an executive coach working with CEOs, MDs and leadership teams across the South East. You can find her on LinkedIn.