Switching off on holiday: why I packed no business books

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

We are taking September off.

Before we go, a confession that seems to bother people more than it should. I am not taking a single business book with me. Not one.

Every August my feed fills with the same photograph. Eight books on a sun lounger, spines out, all of them about strategy, or habits, or somebody’s rules for winning. I have posted a version of that picture myself. This year I am doing the opposite, and I have come round to thinking switching off on holiday is a more serious subject than the book stack it usually hides behind.

Three questions before a book goes in my bag:

1. Could it appear on a stand at a trade show? Leave it.
2. Will I be tempted to take notes? Leave it.
3. Would I be faintly embarrassed to list it publicly? Pack it.

Your fortnight away is the only honest test you get

You spend the year building an operation that runs without heroics. Standard work, clear ownership, escalation that does not depend on one phone.

Your two weeks away is the only unannounced test that structure ever gets.

You cannot leave and pretend nothing will happen. Something always does. But there are two versions of coming home, and they tell you very different things.

In the first, you return to a mess and a list of decisions that were made without you, some of them differently from how you would have made them. That is a working operation. Uncomfortable, but working.

In the second, nothing moved. Every judgement call sat in a queue with your name on it, and the first week back is spent clearing a backlog that was really just waiting for permission.

The second one is not loyalty. It is a design fault, and your holiday found it for free. Nothing else in your year will surface it that cleanly.

So the useful question is not whether you can afford to go. It is what the answer would tell you.

Your out of office is a policy document

Here is the bit that gets underplayed.

Nobody who reports to you will take a proper break if you do not take one. Not really. They will book the time, and then they will check in, because they watched you do it.

If you answer within the hour from a beach, you have told your whole organisation what is expected of them, and you have told them far more convincingly than any wellbeing initiative will. Your out of office is the most widely read policy document you will publish this year.

That is worth sitting with, because it is one of the few parts of the culture a COO can change instantly and for free. Not with a programme. By going away properly, once, visibly.

Ask yourself who on your direct team has not taken two consecutive weeks in the past year. Then ask whether that was their choice or yours. Most of us have never actually asked, because the answer arrives as a resignation rather than a conversation, and by then it looks like a personal decision instead of an operational one.

Definition. By switching off on holiday, we mean going long enough without work input that your attention resets and unrelated thoughts start turning up on their own. It is not the absence of email. It is the absence of the subject.

Frameworks are not what you are short of

Which brings me to the reading.

Think honestly about the last business book you finished. Can you name three things in it you did not already believe?

I have a decent record of buying them and a poor record of using them. The good ones confirm something you had half-noticed. The bad ones name something obvious and sell it as a discovery. Neither changes what you do on the Tuesday after you get back.

There is also the practical problem. Open a book about operational excellence on day three and you are not on holiday any more. You are working, with a better view. The instinct that makes someone good at running an operation is the instinct to keep feeding the problem, and that instinct does not switch off at the airport. A business book is exactly what it will reach for.

What actually changes your thinking is running into a structure you did not have. A Roman general who did the work while somebody else took the title. A century of borders drawn by people who had never visited the places they were dividing. None of it teaches you anything about your operation, and that is precisely the point. It gives you a shape to think with, and your brain finds its own use for it, usually about six weeks later and without asking permission.

Frameworks arrive labelled. Analogies arrive sideways. Only one of them survives a plane journey.

What is on my list this September

Four books. No, I am not going to tell you what any of them teach us about leadership.

Agrippa, Robert Harris. Out on 27 August, which is either good timing or targeted advertising. Rome, ambition, and the man who ran things while somebody else wore the laurel.

Nonesuch, Francis Spufford. Magic and mathematics in wartime Britain, and about five hundred pages of it. This is the long one. Attention that has to stretch is the thing I am trying to repair.

The Cauldron, Simon Sebag Montefiore. The making of the modern Middle East. The closest thing to homework on the list, and only because the news assumes you already know all of it.

The Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown. The honest entry. Nobody is going to call it literature. I will read it in two days by the pool and enjoy every page. That is the entire point of it being there.

If you were waiting for me to explain what Agrippa teaches us about succession planning, you have missed the argument.

What I have got wrong about switching off on holiday

Every one of these is mine, and most of them more than once.

• Packing a target. Five books in ten days is not a holiday. It is a to-do list with sand in it.
• The “just in case” book. It gets read. That is why it went in the bag.
• Reading on the phone. The device holding the book also holds the inbox. It is not a fair fight.
• Checking in lightly. There is no light version. One look at a report and you are back on shift, and it takes another two days to get out again.
• Treating the first three days as wasted. The flatness is not lost time. It is the thing working.
• Going back the day after landing. A buffer day is worth more than an extra day away, and it costs the same.

That last one is the only signal that really counts, and you cannot measure it from a sun lounger. Judge the holiday in October, not on the flight home.

What to do on Monday

Nothing. Relax, and read something with no possible use to you.

Takeaways

• Treat the fortnight as a test of the operation, not a reward for it.
• Go properly, because your team is watching how you do it.
• Leave the business books at home. You are not short of frameworks.
• Book a buffer day between landing and your first meeting.
• Judge the break by what you decide in October, not by what you read in August.

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We are back in October. Until then the site is quiet and so am I. Switching off on holiday is not time taken away from the work. It is part of how the work gets better, and part of how everyone else learns they are allowed to do it too.

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Sources

No NLCo project research files are cited in this piece. The observations about rest, reading and returning to work are the author’s own, offered as experience rather than evidence. Book links go to Amazon UK.

• Robert Harris, Agrippa, Hutchinson Heinemann, 2026. View on Amazon
• Francis Spufford, Nonesuch, Faber, 2026. View on Amazon
• Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2026. View on Amazon
• Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets, Bantam, 2025. View on Amazon