Happy Friday Reader

Emma booked the holiday we've just come back from. If it had been left to me, I don't think it would have happened.

I think it's because for most of my working life I never made that decision. For fifteen years as a teacher and then a school leader, the calendar made it for me. Term finished and you stopped, whether you felt ready for it or not. Then I went out on my own, the structure went with it and nothing took its place, so it's just me deciding now. I'm very good at finding a reason to wait. "After this next thing" has been my answer for about three years.

The annoying part is that the big holiday I keep saving myself for doesn't really do the job anyway. Jessica de Bloom and colleagues pooled the studies on holidays in 2009 and found the boost to health and wellbeing was real but small, and that it faded once people were back at work, mostly within the first week. A reanalysis published in 2023 with more recent studies landed in much the same place. A fortnight in Thailand buys you about a week back at your desk. Do We Recover from Vacation? Meta‐analysis of Vacation Effects on Health and Well‐being​

Which puts the weight on the ordinary stuff, the Tuesday evening and the Saturday afternoon. Sabine Sonnentag has a name for why we're bad at those. She calls it the recovery paradox: when work is heaviest, people switch off from it least, sleep worse and move less, which is exactly when the recovery would be worth most. Waiting until you feel able to stop means waiting for a signal that tends to turn up late.

There's a finding from Bennett and colleagues too. Pooling the recovery research in 2018, they found that feeling in control of your own non-work time had a stronger link with vigour than switching off did, while switching off was more closely tied to lower fatigue. So the deciding may be doing some of the work, not only the resting. All of this is association rather than proof, and the effects are modest, but it points the same way. Wiley Online Library​

Before you close the laptop today, pick the hours this weekend you are not working. Say when they start and end, say where your phone is going, and tell someone at home so it costs you something to break. Then open next week's diary and do the same for one evening.

It feels daft scheduling rest like a meeting, and I've still not got used to doing it.

If making those calls is the bit you keep putting off, it's a lot of what I end up working on with leaders in one to one coaching.

What's the rest decision you keep postponing? Hit reply and tell me.

Shane

PS Cohort two of the Intensive started this week, with leaders from the UK, Germany, Luxembourg, China, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. What a group.