The holiday you took but didn't actually take

I'm a few days out from a two-week break. My longest in some time. And I've already caught myself doing the exact thing I'm about to argue against. Quietly clearing the inbox. Tying off loose ends. Pre-empting the "quick questions" so I can properly switch off. As if disconnection is a task you finish before you leave. Rather than something you actually have to do while you're gone.

Ireland gave us the right to disconnect five years ago. In April 2021, the Workplace Relations Commission published its Code of Practice on the Right to Disconnect. Three simple rights: not to be routinely asked to work outside your hours, not to be penalised for switching off, and not to be routinely contacted out of hours, including on annual leave.

Five years on, the question is simple. Has anything actually changed?

July & August are when it gets tested. The office empties out. The out-of-office goes on. And then the quiet contradiction begins. People are at the beach, checking Outlook, MS Teams and Slack. Managers send emails with a footer that says “no need to reply until you’re back,” which everyone reads and nobody believes. The leave is taken on paper. The disconnection never happens.

And the numbers back this up. A 2025 survey of white-collar workers across the UK, France and Spain by Robert Walters found that 51% of British workers check their inbox while on annual leave, most of them out of fear of the email avalanche waiting on their return. Nearly four in five said they feel anxious before going back to work after a longer break. We are taking the leave. We are just not taking the rest.

Closer to home, more than a third of Irish workers, 35%, didn’t use their full annual leave entitlement in 2024, and almost one in four left a full week or more on the table. Men were the worst offenders: over 40% had unused leave, compared with under a third of women. We’re not just failing to switch off on holiday. A lot of us aren’t taking the holiday at all. (FRS Recruitment Annual Leave Report 2025, survey of almost 2,000 Irish workers.)

Here’s the thing the policy gets right that most of us get wrong. The right to disconnect is not about emails. It’s about recovery. And recovery is not the same as time off.

What switching off actually does

There’s a concept in the research called psychological detachment. It means genuinely switching off mentally, not just physically being elsewhere. The body on the beach, the mind still in the meeting, doesn’t count.

The evidence here is strong and growing. A 2024 longitudinal study published in PLOS One, following a working-age cohort over time, found that people who detached well from work, and those who got better at it, reported higher wellbeing, lower anxiety and greater life satisfaction. A separate month-long study of IT employees found that checking work email after hours was linked to poorer sleep quality and disrupted the recovery that off-time is supposed to provide. The act of checking is not neutral. It keeps the system switched on.

This is the part that matters for performance, and the part organisations consistently miss. Rest isn’t the absence of work. It’s the thing that makes the work sustainable. The brain doesn’t recover on standby. It recovers when it’s actually allowed to power down.

So the manager checking in “just quickly” over someone’s leave isn’t getting a small favour. They’re drawing down the exact resource the holiday was meant to rebuild.

Why the Code hasn’t fixed it

In my view, the Code of Practice was always going to struggle, and it’s worth being honest about why.

It isn’t legally binding. An employee can’t bring a claim for breach of the right to disconnect on its own. In the years since 2021, only a handful of cases before the WRC have even referenced it. A right that can’t be enforced is really a suggestion. And suggestions lose, every time, to a culture that quietly rewards the person who answers at 11pm on a Sunday.

That’s the real issue. This was never going to be solved by a document. It’s solved, or not, by what teams actually model. The behaviour that gets noticed becomes the behaviour that gets copied. If the leadership team works through their own leave, no policy on earth will convince anyone else it’s safe to stop.

What organisations that take it seriously do differently

The organisations that get this right don’t do it with a stricter policy. They do it with a few specific, visible behaviours.

They make cover real, not theoretical. Before someone goes on leave, the genuinely urgent items have a named person to go to. Most “quick checks” happen because the alternative is chaos. Remove the chaos and you remove the check.

Leaders disconnect visibly. When the people at the top actually switch off, and say so, it gives everyone else permission. Behaviour beats memos.

They separate sending from expecting. If you must write an email out of hours, schedule it to land in working hours. “I sent it whenever suited me, you read it whenever suits you” only works if it’s true.

None of this needs a new programme. It needs a team to decide that rest is part of the work, not a break from it.

So this summer, by all means take the leave. But take the rest too. That’s the part the policy was really pointing at, and the part only you, and the people you work with, can actually protect.

A book I’ve read recently and will read again

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman.

Burkeman’s premise is that the average human life is around four thousand weeks, and that the whole project of getting on top of everything is a trap. We will never clear the inbox. There will always be more to do than time to do it. His point isn’t to work faster. It’s to accept the limit, and choose. I keep coming back to it, because the guilt of switching off is really the fear that the pile will grow while you’re gone. It will. Burkeman’s answer is that this was always true, and resting anyway is the only sane response to a finite life.

One thing to try this week

Pick one 24-hour window in the next fortnight and put the phone fully away. Not on silent. Not face down. Off, or in another room. A bounded, specific, achievable block. Notice the urge to check, and notice that nothing falls apart. The goal isn’t a digital detox lecture. It’s one clean piece of evidence that you can disconnect, and the world keeps turning.