I took ten days off. Actually off … sync stopped, notifications off, focus mode on, laptop closed, no half-checking “just in case.” As far as I can remember, that hasn’t happened in about two and a half years.
I didn’t plan it as an experiment. I just needed the time. But somewhere around day four, something shifted, and by day ten I was a slightly different person than the one who left.
More tired than I knew
The first thing the time off showed me was how tired I actually was. Not tired in the way you usually think about. Tired in the fatigued way you only find out about once you stop.
This time off I was riding bikes up mountains. That tires you, just physically, but what it brings is solitude, friend time, trash talk about stupid shit. The body is doing the work, not the mind. There’s something intriguing about how draining the body recharges the brain.
The seat you sit in shapes what you see
Part of why I didn’t notice is the nature of the seat I’m in. Leading people means you spend most of your working hours on what’s wrong. The escalation, the risk, the thing that slipped, the person who’s struggling, the fire that needs someone senior on it right now. That’s the job description, and most of the time it’s exactly the right use of a leader’s time.
But it does something to your perspective if you’re never off the clock long enough to counterbalance it. When almost everything that reaches you is a problem, your baseline read on how things are going quietly drifts negative, even when the actual picture is fine, or good, or better than fine. You stop noticing it happening because you’re inside it every day. There’s no day-over-day signal, it’s too gradual for that.
Coming back, I expected to feel refreshed, and I did. What I didn’t expect was the second thing: a kind of outside view of my own working life that I simply didn’t get while in it.
Things that are invisible from inside the daily grind became obvious from ten days outside of it. Which pressures were mine to carry and which ones I’d quietly picked up because nobody else would. Which parts of the week were actually necessary and which were just habit wearing the costume of necessity. Where my tone had gotten short with people who didn’t deserve it, leaning into small things harder than they needed, not because I’d meant to, but because I hadn’t stepped back far enough, in two and a half years, to notice I’d drifted there.
None of that shows up on a normal day. It only shows up once you’ve been far enough away to see the shape of the thing instead of just the next task in front of you.
What I owe the people who work for me
There’s a leadership piece to this I didn’t expect. I tell my team, regularly, that using their time off is not a problem, and I mean it. But people don’t calibrate off what I say. They calibrate off what I do.
If I’m never really gone, if I’m still half-present through every “day off,” the actual message underneath the policy is that stepping back is for everyone except the person setting the example. Taking ten real days, and coming back sharper instead of more depleted, is the only version of that message that means anything. Not a Slack message, a real example.
There’s a harder piece under that one. My lack of real time off didn’t just cost me, it cost the people around me. The snippiness, the shorter fuse, treating small things like they were bigger than they were … that lands on someone, usually someone who did nothing to deserve it. Being a better leader isn’t only about being kinder to myself. It’s about being more effective for the people I’m responsible for, and I hadn’t fully connected that until I’d stepped away long enough to see it.
The part that must be said out loud
Here’s the uncomfortable bit, and I don’t think I’m the only one who feels it. Taking real time off right now, when a lot of people are quietly worried about their jobs, can feel like exactly the wrong move. Like stepping back is a risk you can’t afford, like the safest thing is to keep your head down and stay visibly, provably busy.
I get the instinct completely. I’ve felt it, and feel it now. But it has the logic backwards. Running on a depleted tank doesn’t make you safer, it makes your work worse, slowly, in ways that are hard to see from inside your own fatigue, which is exactly the problem I just described. Suboptimal shows up everywhere at once, in your judgment, your patience, your read on people, the quality of the decisions nobody will ever trace back to being tired. You don’t get credit for having pushed through. You just get the diminished version of your own output, and probably don’t notice, because you’re too close to it.
I’m not going to pretend ten days is available to everyone, or that every workplace makes it easy. Some don’t. But if you’re holding off because some part of you has decided that stopping is a risk, I’d gently push back on that math. Staying too close to the grind to ever see what it’s costing you is the real risk. Ten days away was never that.
Be Awesome. And Nice.
Adam