How to take productive holidays

^{Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.}

Happy Wednesday, founders.

You're probably reading this on holiday, if you're even going to open this one.

It's the time of year when our inboxes fill up with automatic replies: "Out of office: Hi! I'm away at the moment and will be back…"

I'm terrible at holidays. My friend’s wedding is in 2 weeks on the other side of the planet, and while I’m excited, I’m more anxious about those 7 days off.

When I take the holiday, I tell myself I'll disconnect, and by day two, I'm checking my emails in the bathroom. So I went looking for what the research actually says about breaks: how long they need to be for it to be effective, when the benefits vanish, and whether there's a way to make rest productive without turning it into another task on the list.

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There are hardly any founders I know who don’t resist holidays: we come back from a trip, and by Tuesday the inbox has already buried it, so holidays seem to stress us even more with the amount of catch-up required.

Some researchers called this the ‘fade-out’ effect.

A 2024 study synthesised 13 studies involving 1,428 employees, with an average vacation length of 11 days. Vacations produced measurable reductions in exhaustion, negative affect, and stress across different facets of well-being (Speth et al., 2024).

Within the first week of returning to work, those improvements were statistically gone. Effect sizes dropped to d≤0.12, indistinguishable from pre-vacation levels.

Even when we have never seen the numbers, this ‘fade-out’ effect matches our lived experience. Our workoutlic’s brain goes: rest is luxurious and inefficient. We tell ourselves we will rest "after we fix an operational problem" or "once the new product is out."

We give ourselves an invisible contract that a break is always conditional: it should be earned, even though those conditions never stabilise. Effectively, we never feel like we ‘deserve’ or ‘need’ a holiday.

For many founders, identity and work are fused. Stepping away from the business means stepping away from what gives us a sense of purpose, competence, and control. A holiday requires us to sit with who we are outside of what we’re building, and that can be more uncomfortable than a 14-hour workday.

The resistance is rational on the surface, but it always takes a health scare, a hospital visit, for us to realise maybe we should cherish our minds and bodies first.

So the question becomes, is there a way to be productive without skipping the break, enjoy its benefits in nourishing our well-being, and thoroughly spend uninterrupted time away with family and friends?

De Bloom, Geurts, and Kompier (2012) tracked 54 employees on vacations averaging 23 days and found that health and well-being increased quickly during the first week, peaked on day 8, and then plateaued. Extending a vacation beyond two weeks did not improve recovery. The researchers described a pattern in which the steepest gains occurred early, and the curve flattened.

At the other end, a randomised controlled trial by Blank et al. (2018) studied 40 middle managers over just four nights and found large, immediate reductions in perceived stress and strain, regardless of whether participants stayed in a hotel or at home.

The practical takeaway from the literature: 4-10 days is optimal, with 8 days being the best. A short long-weekend holiday of 4 days produces positive physiological effects, and time off longer than two weeks does not increase positive effects on wellbeing.

In 2007, psychologists published a framework that has since become the most widely used model in work-recovery research. The Recovery Experience Questionnaire identified four distinct experiences that determine how time off restores us:

1. Psychological detachment

Mentally disengaging from work, not checking Slack, or rehearsing Monday's pitch in the shower. The research shows that, out of all four, detachment has the strongest and most reliable association with recovery outcomes.

2. Relaxation

Low physical and mental activation. Physical and cognitive demands drop to baseline (unless you’re doing bungee jumps on your holidays, of course.)

3. Mastery

Learning or doing something challenging outside of work. A new language, a difficult hike, a skill that has nothing to do with the business. This builds internal resources (competence, self-efficacy) through a different channel than work does.

4. Control

Choosing how to spend the time. This is when we can decide on the schedule, or not to have one altogether, instead of fitting around your day with Teams calls.

The critical insight from this 2007 study is that the quality of these experiences during time off predicts whether someone returns to work with resources intact.

A two-week holiday spent answering investor emails poolside may score high on relaxation but scores zero on detachment. A four-day trip where we are genuinely unreachable and learning to cook something unfamiliar may score higher across all four dimensions than a fortnight at a resort.

We operate in a reality where full detachment is rarely possible. There are stakeholders, team members making decisions, and clients with deadlines. We can’t afford to totally disappear, but if we want to maximise our return on investment for that time in rest, it is important to deliberately and actively practice the 4 recovery dimensions.

So, what are the actionable steps?

1. Create a communication boundary

Full disconnection is unrealistic for most founders, and the anxiety of going fully dark can itself prevent recovery. A more effective approach: designate one 20-minute check-in window per day and communicate it to the team in advance.

You can set a usage limit for your email or Slack on your iOS phone and laptop (Not me pressing ‘15 more minutes’ or ‘Ignore limit for today’ at my 10.30 pm downtime app limits…)

This protects psychological detachment for the remaining hours while preventing the low-grade worry about what we might be missing.

2. Pre-determine what "done" means before leaving

The biggest threat to detachment is unresolved decisions, the open loops we leave behind follow us into the holiday. Before taking a break, close or explicitly list every decision that is sitting in limbo.

If you need to think through a big work problem during the holiday, the very least you can do is write down your options to reduce the cognitive cost of ambiguity.

3. Schedule mastery

A holiday that is only lying flat on a hotel bed or an Airbnb sofa can still leave us more restless. The four-holiday-dimensions model suggests that recovery is not purely passive: learning something, a physical challenge, or a creative project provides the brain with a different kind of engagement that nourishes our minds and stretches our creative muscles.

4. Protect the first 48 hours back

The first two days back should not be a wall of meetings and catch-up calls. Use that time to re-enter gradually. The research suggests the speed of the fade-out effect is influenced by the conditions we return to, which means we have some control over how quickly the recovery erodes.

5. Take more frequent, smaller breaks

The meta-analytic data consistently point in the same direction: multiple shorter breaks throughout the year outperform a single extended annual holiday. The fade-out effect is inevitable, but the frequency of recovery is more important than the duration of any single episode.

So, are we feeling a little more ready for the summer holiday now?

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

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