Why a holiday doesn’t fix burnout in tech
If you work in digital or tech and came back from your holiday feeling more tired than when you left, you're far from alone. Here's why a week or two off rarely fixes burnout in tech, and what helps instead.
"I think I need a holiday just to get over my holiday."
I've lost count of how many calls I've been on after the summer holidays where someone's said exactly that. Even the ones who went full all inclusive, where the hardest decision all week was the cocktail order at the swim up bar.
Sure, this time of year can be one of those rare moments where we finally get to breathe: proper time with the people we love, maybe even reading the book that's been gathering dust on the bedside table since last year.
The before and after nobody talks about
Except for a lot of us in digital and tech, that two weeks off (at most) tends to come with a before and after that looks a bit like this:
Cramming three weeks' worth of work into the one before you go
Coming back to an under resourced team while most are still away
Management still expecting the same velocity and sprint points, regardless of who's actually in the building
Heading straight into golden quarter planning while still catching up on BAU
Teammates messaging you with "sorry, I know you're on holiday, but…"
Evenings spent catching up from a day you actually spent managing the childcare juggle with the kids off school
And for a lot of women in digital, this so called recovery period is particularly non stop, because the caregiving still mostly falls to us: organising the playdates, booking the holiday clubs, on top of a workload that hasn't gone anywhere.
It's not only a parents' issue, either. Colleagues without kids come back to exactly the same under resourced team and, in some cases, end up absorbing even more of the slack. I remember a line manager once assuming I could just pick up the extra, rather than other team members, simply because I didn't have the same demands waiting for me at home.
But so what? This isn't new, this is just what always happens, right?
Keep delivering. Don't stop, even when on holiday. One foot always in the world of work, one eye always on the phone whilst you're on the sun lounger.
Tech already proved this doesn't work
Except we already know this doesn't work. Not really. Not long term. And we especially know it doesn't work if you're in digital and tech, because we're the industry that actually proved it doesn't.
We worked out that progress isn't linear without a proper break built in, and we even gave it a name: Agile development. It replaced the old waterfall approach because trying to plan and deliver everything in one long, unbroken push, with no recovery period, doesn't reliably produce good work. Which is exactly why sprints exist: concentrated bursts of effort followed by a proper pause, a retro, an actual gap, beats grinding on regardless.
There's a performance model published in Harvard Business Review by Loehr and Schwartz that shows exactly why that matters: energy, unlike time, is renewable, but only if you actually swing between pushing hard and properly recovering, not grinding through. A real, proper stop.
So why in digital did we forget the same fix applies to the people running it, not just the work itself? We nailed the sprint. We forgot the recovery.
The companies building rest into the culture
A few companies have already worked out you can apply that same logic to the people, not just the process.
Her First $100K shuts down for a fully paid week every quarter. The whole company is off, not just the people who remembered to book holiday early, and not just those confident enough to be absent while everything continues around them.
Vivun, a technology company, closes for two designated "Quiet Periods" each year. No emails. No Slack. No quietly checking in while pretending to be fully off.
Staffbase has introduced paid "Recharge Fridays" throughout August, with coverage arranged where customer work genuinely cannot stop.
The common thread: none of them are relying on individual willpower to create rest. They've built an organisational boundary around it instead.
Not all of us can work somewhere like that, or single handedly overhaul company culture. But there are smaller moves. If you're a line manager in July and August: question every BAU meeting in the diary. Is it really needed? How many stand ups could just be a Slack update instead? And if you're planning releases and sprints, factor in August's slower pace, not just for the delivery team, the whole approval chain moves differently that month too.
Working in peaks and troughs
Personally, my best work often comes from going in peaks and troughs too. I go hard at projects, get properly in the flow, helped by the right amount of pressure and deadlines to work to. But it only works because I finally stopped feeling guilty about the other side of it: I now properly rest, not the kind of short break that isn't really a break at all. I've built my career around it, deliberately choosing more flexibility so I can properly switch off and restore my energy when I need to.
But it's not just about the rest, it's what happens on the way back up too. Building towards the next peak is its own skill, and it comes down to focusing on what actually re energises you: for me it's movement, time in person with people and zooming out to strategy instead of the next sprint; rather than just switching your laptop back on and hoping the momentum returns on its own.
When you can't control the workload
Not everyone has that much say over what the next few months look like, and if that's you, go easy on yourself. Some of the stress research on this is genuinely useful: it's often not the situation itself that wears us down, it's the feeling of having no control over it.
You can't control the workload, the golden quarter, or who's off when. But you can usually still choose the smaller things: how you start your morning, whether you take the walk, who you actually see this week. Put your energy there instead of the whole unmanageable picture, and it tends to feel a little more manageable, even when the circumstances haven't actually changed.
And if any of this (that swing between pushing hard and recovering, the wondering whether slowing down is even allowed) has you thinking about the bigger pattern and the pace of the whole role, that's exactly the conversation I have with clients all the time. Book a free intro call and we can talk it through.
And if you read this far, thanks for sticking with me.
Olivia