Should you really switch off from work?
A reflection on thinking about work outside working hours, the difference between curiosity and rumination, and the boundaries leaders set for others.
Leading People · Recovery · Boundaries · Self-awareness
Should you really switch off from work completely?
YouTubeThis article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
I’m not convinced we always need to switch off completely from work. A scandalous statement, I realise. Before anyone recruits me to deliver a presentation about the benefits of working through lunch, trust me: I am not a workaholic. I am rather lazy by nature, and quite protective of that arrangement. But hear me out.
I find myself thinking about work when I’m doing something completely unrelated to it. I’ll be in the car, or walking around the shops, and my mind will return to a conversation from earlier in the week. Sometimes it jumps forward instead. Something is coming up, and my immediate response is either, “Oh God, that’s happening,” or, “Actually, I’m looking forward to that.”
Neither requires me to open a laptop. Often, nothing needs doing at all. But it made me wonder whether these moments meant I wasn’t switching off properly, and whether switching off properly was quite what I had assumed it to be.
The advice is familiar enough: close the laptop, protect your evenings, stop checking messages and give yourself a proper break. I agree with that. What I find harder to accept is the idea that a successful break must involve no thoughts about work whatsoever. If something interests me on Friday, I’m not sure why remembering it on Saturday should automatically count as a failure of boundaries.
There is a less comfortable part to the question, too. I wonder whether disconnecting completely makes returning harder. Perhaps keeping a little of the work in mind helps me feel prepared. Perhaps that is simply a convincing explanation for a habit I haven’t examined closely enough.
What kind of thinking am I doing?
The research gave me a useful reason to slow down before defending my position. Psychological detachment means mentally disengaging from work during time away from it. A large meta-analysis found that greater detachment was associated with less exhaustion, better sleep and better wellbeing. There is a substantial case for being able to leave work alone, even if I happen to enjoy parts of it. Wendsche and Lohmann-Haislah, 2017.
But the kind of thinking also appears to matter. In a study of 719 workers, Dawn Querstret and Mark Cropley distinguished emotionally charged rumination from thinking through work problems. The former was associated with greater fatigue; the latter with less. This was a questionnaire study, so it doesn’t establish that thinking about work causes either outcome. It does suggest that treating every work-related thought as the same experience misses something important. Querstret and Cropley, 2012.
That distinction feels closer to what I recognise in myself. Remembering something I’m excited about next week is different from mentally attending a difficult meeting three days before it happens. In both cases, work has entered my head. What it asks of me once it gets there can be quite different.
I can imagine a useful thought arriving while I’m shopping: another way to explain something, a connection I hadn’t made, a question worth bringing into a conversation. I don’t particularly want to police that out of existence. I would like to be able to notice it and continue with what I was doing.
What deserves more attention is the thought that keeps asking me to return. The same conversation, the same concern, the same imaginary response, without anything becoming clearer. Calling that preparation might make it feel productive, but I would want some evidence that I was actually preparing, rather than repeatedly making myself experience something unpleasant.
Even then, the distinction isn’t perfectly tidy. Thinking through a real problem can become tiring. An initially interesting idea can occupy far more of an evening than I intended. I don’t think I can decide whether something is helping me simply by giving it the more flattering label.
The question I find useful is what happens afterwards. Can I return to the thing in front of me? Has the thought clarified something, or am I more unsettled than before? Those seem more revealing than whether work happened to cross my mind.
A thought doesn’t have to become a task
Part of what I’m reconsidering is the assumption that remembering something creates an obligation to act on it. If I think of an idea on Sunday, I don’t necessarily need to develop it on Sunday. Remembering a conversation doesn’t require me to reopen it, and feeling a little uncertainty about Monday doesn’t mean I can resolve Monday from the supermarket.
That sounds obvious when I write it down. It becomes less obvious when doing one small thing promises to remove the discomfort. Just check the message. Just make the change. Just get the answer, and then you can properly relax.
I can see how easily that could become a routine in which time away from work is always waiting for work to grant permission. There will nearly always be another loose end available. If feeling completely finished is the condition for stopping, I have set myself a fairly difficult condition.
There is also something questionable about my concern that switching off might make it harder to get back into work. Monday may require a little time to remember where I was. I’m not sure that is a problem serious enough to justify keeping part of myself at work all weekend.
I don’t have a neat rule for this yet. I’m more interested in noticing whether I have room to leave something unfinished, or whether every passing thought starts another negotiation about my attention. Enjoying the work and being unable to put it down can look similar from the outside. I would rather not rely entirely on my own enthusiasm to tell them apart.
When my interest reaches somebody else
As a leader, there is another consequence I need to consider. A thought can remain private, but the moment I send it to somebody, it becomes part of their day too. My interest in an idea doesn’t tell me whether they have any interest in receiving it at that moment.
I might imagine that adding “No need to respond until Monday” settles the matter. It may help, but I wouldn’t assume it removes every expectation attached to a message from a manager. The person receiving it has their own history of what gets noticed, what gets rewarded and how quickly people are expected to respond.
That makes this more than a personal preference about when I like to think. If I choose to spend some of my own time developing an idea, I need to consider whether I’m quietly making that choice for somebody else. I can save a thought without immediately distributing it.
So I still don’t think a passing thought about work means I’ve failed to switch off. Sometimes it reflects curiosity or excitement, and I’m comfortable with that. But I’m less persuaded by my own argument that staying slightly connected is necessary to make returning easier.
The next time work appears in my head while I’m shopping, I don’t need to congratulate myself for being committed or criticise myself for having poor boundaries. I can notice what the thought is doing and whether I’m able to leave it there. If I keep finding that I can’t, that deserves more honesty than simply telling myself I care about my job.
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