Most leaders spend the holidays planning to switch off. Few actually manage it.
Arthur C. Brooks has made a compelling case that we are overusing the analytical, task-driven part of our brains — what he calls left-hemisphere thinking. It’s the mode built for executing, judging, and solving. It’s also the mode most of us live in from the moment we open our inbox to the moment we close the laptop. The always-on nature of leadership rewards this kind of thinking. It does not leave much room for the right-hemisphere territory of meaning, mystery, and connection — the part of us that asks why rather than how.
The problem is that this constant analytical load doesn’t just tire us out — it crowds out the mental space where meaning and new ideas actually form. That space rarely opens up while we’re sprinting through a to-do list. It opens up when the mind is allowed to wander.
So here’s a practical paradox for leaders heading into the summer holidays: a short burst of left-brain effort, done well, is what actually clears the runway for real rest and real space for meaning and mystery.
This is where something like Stephen Covey’s Eisenhower Matrix earns its keep. Not as a productivity hack to squeeze in more output, but as a one-time clearing exercise. Sort what’s urgent and important from what’s neither. Decide what genuinely needs your attention before the break, and what can simply wait. Do this once, deliberately, and you remove the background hum of half-tracked tasks that otherwise follow you onto the beach or into every long summer evening.
That hum is the real enemy of a good break. It’s not that we’re physically still at our desks — it’s that part of our brain never stops triaging. We tell ourselves we’re relaxing while quietly still running the analytical loop in the background. A short, focused prioritisation session interrupts that loop on purpose, so it doesn’t run uninvited for the next two weeks.
For leaders specifically, this matters beyond personal wellbeing. The best strategic thinking, the ideas that reshape a team or a business, rarely emerge from another planning meeting. They emerge from the kind of loose, unstructured thinking that only happens when the analytical mind has been given permission to stand down. If you want to come back from your break with genuinely fresh thinking — not just rested, but with renewed clarity — the work starts before the holiday, not during it.
So this year, try a different kind of preparation. Don’t just clear your desk. Clear your head. Spend an hour with a proper prioritisation pass — what’s truly urgent, what’s truly important, what’s neither — and close the loop on it consciously. Then let the rest of the break be exactly what it’s meant to be: unstructured, unhurried, and genuinely off.
Your best ideas for the second half of the year might be waiting for exactly that kind of space.
