When Should You Take a Break, Vacation, or Sabbatical?

I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever wondered, “If I take time off if I take a break, what will happen with all the things I have my hands in right now? Will I lose momentum? Will everything get done? Who will make sure all the things and people are taken care of?”

When should you take a break, vacation, or sabbatical? This is the framework that I use.

My Weekly Rhythm

I want to start with the framework I use for my planning my weekly rhythm because it helps me avoid burnout, fatigue, and irritability. My goal is to set up my weekly schedule so that even though I love my work, I still have lots of time for my family, hobbies, and staying physically active. All of these deeply impact my health and well-being.

The best framework I have found to do that is to break my week into 21 segments made up of 7 days and 3 segments of each day: morning, afternoon, and evening. Then, I set up my week so that I only work 10 segments each week.

If I don’t have any evening or weekend meetings, events, coaching, or teaching sessions, then it’s pretty easy to plan my 10 segments during the morning and afternoons of Monday-Friday. So, my week will look like this:

Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat	Sun
X	X	X	X	X
X	X	X	X	X

If I do have evening or weekend work engagements, then I adjust my schedule so that I still only work 10 of the 21 weekly segments. Say I have a Tuesday evening meeting, then I will take either Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning off. If I also need to work on Saturday, I might take Friday or the following Monday off. I’m actually more likely to take Monday off so that I still have a two-day weekend. So, here’s what that week would look like:

Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat	Sun	Mon
X	X		X	X	X
X	X	X	X	X	X
	X

Because I don’t work an evening shift, and our family time is not set up for me to work an evening shift, my aim is to only work two nights a week. That way, I’m not missing all the time from dinner time when reconnect after being apart all day and the rest of our family time in the evenings.

When I keep to only working 10 segments each week, rarely am I in dire need of a vacation or sabbatical. And it’s easy to schedule them in advance, which I love to do (as it gives me something to look forward to).

Breaks During All-Hands-On-Deck Seasons

And then there are seasons (ahem, like this one) during which it’s ‘all-hands-on-deck” for an extended period of time. We all know that these seasons happen not just during pandemics and responding to racial injustices, but whenever we launch something new, or move, or even annually during certain times of the year.

When these seasons are cyclical and we know they are coming, it’s wise to plan a vacation or sabbatical before they come.

But if they come out of the blue and we can’t plan for them, then we need to have some a different kind of framework for knowing when we need to take a break/vacation/sabbatical. And that kind of framework is much less objective, and more subjective because it’s entirely dependent upon our health and well-being.

Some of the signs we want to look for in ourselves of needing to take a real break are:

• A regular weekend of 2-days off is not enough to rest and recover for a new week
• We’re more irritable than usual
• We have a harder time than normal laughing at ourselves
• We’re having a harder time sleeping (either falling asleep or staying asleep)
• It’s been a while since we’ve had a good laugh and genuinely enjoyed ourselves.

There are certainly other signs for each of us individually, but these are fairly universal signs that it is time to schedule a break/vacation/sabbatical right now.

There is no shame in needing to schedule an unplanned break. In fact, everyone around us will thank us for it. During all-hands-on-deck seasons, our stress, anxiety, irritability, and exhaustion are no secret to those around us. And when we finally admit that we need a real break, it’s a welcomed one.

How long of a break is needed?

And when we do take an unplanned break, we simply need to delegate the absolutely essential things to someone else and unplug. For some of us, 3 days is enough, for others of us, we need 8 days or 14 days or even 21. A study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies suggests that in order to experience optimal levels of health and well-being the optimal length of a vacation is 8 days (and minimally 3 days).

So, when we are scared about taking a break and wonder, “If I take time off if I take a break, what will happen with all the things I have my hands in right now? Will I lose momentum? Will everything get done? Who will make sure all the things and people are taken care of?” let me encourage you that indeed, everything will be okay. After all, how can we continue to serve others well if we’ve sacrificed our health and well-being?

We can only treat marathons like a sprint for so long before we can't finish what we started. And what's it worth us if we can't finish?