Professional Facepalms: A Six-Part Series
Because if you can’t laugh at your own career mistakes, someone else will.
Part #2 - Step Away and Take the Time You’ve Earned
I used to think I’d cracked the code of workplace efficiency and discovered the number one career hack: drink coffee at your desk, eat lunch at your desk, drink coffee at your desk again, and throw in a brisk stroll or two around the office for some cardio. Why bother with real downtime when you can multitask instead?
The health benefits of a high intensity interval training regimen of a mosey to the snack machine and a single deep knee bend to get a box of my favourite pens from the lowest shelf in the supply room are obvious. I was also pretty strict about alternating the hand I used to lift my coffee mug because I was loath to develop asymmetrical biceps.
The threat is real. If you just picked up your coffee mug with your other hand, then my work is done. Thank me later.
My Schwarzenegger-like workout routine notwithstanding, when it came to caffeine and macronutrients, I reasoned that I would enjoy the same benefits of both irrespective of where they were consumed. Which begged the question: “Why leave my desk at all?” I might just as well stay there and soldier on.
Welcome To Another Episode of “Todd Was Wrong”
It turns out, like so many other things in my life, from every fashion choice I’ve ever made, every joke I’ve ever told — even how to correctly hang some netting for a sweet pea plant to climb*, I didn’t know what I was doing.
In Part #1, I spoke about how people mistake the extra work they do on evenings and weekends as indicators of being a diligent and conscientious employee. In this installment, I give you some fantastic tips on how you can burn that very same candle from the other end by shortchanging yourself on coffee and lunch breaks, even vacation time. I was guilty of doing this too, thus helping to further stoke my own burnout bonfire while blithely ignoring the blaze engulfing me.
And, occasionally, I’d turn it into a full-blown inferno by throwing gas on it.
* - I’m pretty sure I could write an entire article just on this story. I’m also pretty sure that my wife has never laughed harder at my expense. Someday I’ll regale you with the details, but it’s only been 30+ years so the memory is still far too raw.
The Hidden Epidemic of Never Actually Stopping
It turns out I’m not unique. There are myriad studies and surveys that show that lots of people don’t take proper lunch or coffee breaks, instead partaking of both at their desks (indeed, if they take any breaks at all). Some people come into work when they’re sick, because being the modern-day equivalent of Typhoid Mary (COVID Karen?) makes perfect sense when you’ve got a deadline to meet. Or they schedule vacation in short bursts as opposed to longer stretches, and when they do get away, they periodically check in with the very office that they are supposed to be getting away from. Or that some people don’t use all their vacation credits, either because they can’t or won’t.
But those selfsame studies also all invariably point to the same conclusion: that taking breaks will not only increase your productivity and your job satisfaction but improve your mental health as well.
Yet people continue to feel tethered to their keyboards. They feel guilty for stepping away at all.
Why is that?
The Noble Crusade to Impress Absolutely No One
In Part #1, I wrote about how “taking one for the team” (by taking on additional work) tricked me into thinking it was part of a strong work ethic. This is kind of the same thing, or maybe the other side of the same coin. Only now, instead of adding more work to your life equation, you are subtracting your recovery time from it.
Either way, the immutable laws of mathematics still apply: both end up making your life a little suckier.
I can only speak for myself, but I didn’t avoid time off because of my deep and undying love for spreadsheets. I did it because I bought in to some untruths:
If I step away, I’ll let the team down.
If I take a long vacation, I’ll look replaceable.
If I disconnect, I’ll come back to chaos.
Again, these thoughts and feelings manifest as dedication, like you are doing the right thing. And, again, you just end up trading away well-deserved breaks and time off in exchange for the illusion of being indispensable.
So, for better or worse (but mostly for worse), I started to make a habit of prioritizing my availability.
“It’s just a coffee break,” I’d tell myself as I jotted down the details of a program crash while on the phone with a coworker.
“I just gotta check my email real quick,” I’d say as my family was heading downstairs to the hotel’s continental breakfast.
“It’s just some cerebrospinal fluid running out of my nose,” I’d say to my wife as I was heading out the door.
Apparently I wanted to prove I was committed when, in reality, I was setting myself up to be committed.
As the Roman philosopher Seneca put it about 2,000 years ago: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.” And I wasted a lot of my time convincing myself that taking a full 45-minute lunch break away from my desk would cause the company to spontaneously combust, leaving behind a smoldering pile of ash.
It didn’t.
I know. I was as gobsmacked as you.
For years, I mistakenly conflated responsibility with reachability. It was only towards the end of my career when I finally started to truly understand how relatively unimportant I was to the overall well-being of the office that I got better at taking breaks. Coincidentally, this was right around the time I started working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. And, while the more cynical among you may believe that the uptick in the frequency and duration of the breaks I took coincided with my realization that there were no coworkers around me to “impress” with my hyper-commitment to the job, having a Nespresso coffee maker with a milk steamer and an assortment of flavored syrups upstairs in the kitchen played a much larger role.
Office Heroics (and Other Ridiculous Lies We Tell Ourselves)
People convince themselves that skipping breaks makes them look dedicated, like they’re auditioning for “Survivor: Bosses vs. Peons”. That they’re loyal, irreplaceable, the glue holding everything together with just the right amount of Krazy.
DAY 1: “So I suggested that we all skip lunch so we could finish the shelter faster. I think my tribemates really appreciated the leadership role I took on!” Melvin was neither seen nor heard from again. The shelter got finished on day 12.
But these thoughts aren’t badges of honour. They’re impostors disguised as noble intentions. In Part #1, I wrote about how “taking one for the team” tricked me into thinking it was all part and parcel of a strong work ethic. It’s the same mistake: confusing being constantly reachable with being responsible.
We’ve managed to turn “working nonstop” into a weird form of self-congratulation. People chase that little dopamine hit they get from overachieving via personal sacrifice — and then use it to block out the pain of the sacrifice itself.
But that high never lasts. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill (or hedonic adaptation): everyone tends to return to a personal “baseline” of happiness, no matter what happens to them. First described in 1978, the study compared lottery winners and paraplegics, and the findings were that both groups tended to return to their baseline level of happiness within about a year. Later work has shown that most events, even very big ones, don’t permanently change our default happiness setting. So yes, those feelings — the good and the bad — are real. But they’re temporary, and whether you win the jackpot or lose a limb, they’ll subside over time until you eventually end up right back at your normal level of happiness.
Former Winnipeg Jets head coach Paul Maurice once joked about a hot streak his team was on, saying they weren’t going to “dislocate their shoulder giving themselves a pat on the back.” He was right. He understood the fleeting nature of this kind of spike in happiness, and that it needed to be managed along with the team’s expectations moving forward. And over-celebrating the latest office “win”, especially those that come at a personal cost, can leave their own bruises in the form of headaches, irritability or that torn rotator cuff you gave yourself from patting yourself on the back. (I mean, you could go to the hospital and have it looked at, but that would just drive home how replaceable you are to management.)
Sure, there are always times in every office where everyone has to grind a little harder. Sometimes you work through coffee or lunch, and that’s just reality. But when you do it every day, it stops being a temporary push and starts being a lifestyle that nobody notices, and nobody thanks you for. The CEO isn’t secretly impressed you inhaled a sandwich over your keyboard. Your coworkers aren’t nominating you for the Nobel Prize in either the Kicking Ass or Taking Names categories. The clients you broke your back for? Completely oblivious. And if by some miracle they did know, they’d be spectacularly indifferent, maybe deigning to confer upon you the single most insincere golf clap in recorded history. After all, you’re just doing your job. It’s what they’re paying you for.
The trick is knowing when your “above and beyond” effort is truly productive, necessary and worthy, and when it’s just a subtle, almost unnoticeable, form of self-punishment. Grinding every day isn’t noble. It just moves the treadmill faster under your feet.
Out of Office, But Not Out of Reach
While we talk a good game about time off, and we do better than other countries in average days taken, a lot of Canadians still feel vacation deprived. A 2024 report from Expedia found that 58% of Canadians say they do not get enough time off, and about 20% left vacation time on the table last year.
And when people do take the trip, many pay a hidden “time-off tax”. In 2024, ADP Canada reported that Canadians who took a one-week holiday spent an average of 13.6 additional hours wrapped around that week in preparing for their vacation and dealing with the accumulated chaos after they got back.
My company’s vacation policy meant vacation days could not be rolled forward to the next year. In other words, you had to use all your vacation up before the end of the year. It sounds like paradise on paper. In practice? I never banked days off, because I couldn’t. But I sure knew how to split up my vacation days, check email from hotel lobbies, and keep one foot in the office no matter how far I was away.
I thought this made me indispensable. In hindsight, I was just using high-speed internet access to help facilitate a somewhat less than enjoyable holiday. While many Canadians never take all their vacation time, my issue wasn’t hoarding days — it was making sure I was still available while using them.
So if you feel tethered to your desk while you’re on vacation, you’re not imagining it and you’re not alone. Policies, expectations, and our own hero complex all conspire to shorten the leash. I think one cure for this particular malady is what we started doing: crafting a plan that makes your absence equal parts irrelevant and predictable. We’d assemble a handoff document, part survival guide, part 'break glass in case of IT emergency.' It spelled out which unlucky schmo on our team was best suited to field which types of questions, which systems might explode while you’re gone, and how to duct-tape everything back together. The result? Our manager no longer pictured the IT department as a flock of sitting ducks, and the team members left behind felt less like marked targets for angry coworkers from other departments.
You are one part of an ecosystem that has (or at least should have) the capability of functioning while you are in a steakhouse finishing off the “Big 96er” so you and your family get your meals for free.
Not all heroes wear capes; some are bestowed a free T-shirt and steakhouse immortality, though.
Reflection
Skipping breaks. Avoiding long vacations. Staying “reachable.” They’re all little disguises that trick you into believing that you’re doing something admirable or making yourself indispensable.
When I eventually took a real break — no email, no “quick calls,” no laptop smuggled into the beach bag — I learned three important truths:
People managed without me.
The work still got done.
I was more useful when I came back.
Yup. The world continued to spin on its axis unabated, even when I dared look away. (Apparently, it’s been doing that for a while… if Neil deGrasse Tyson is to be believed.)
Work hard, sure, but don’t let your own ego put you in the ICU.
Lesson Learned
Breaks aren’t indulgences. They’re maintenance. No one keeps their car engine running 24 hours a day to prove to themselves that their car still works.
Comedian George Burns once said, “I honestly believe it’s better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.” I’d add that it’s even worse to be a ‘success’ at something you truly love if you feel like you have to drive yourself into the ground to do it.
So, take your coffee break. Take your lunch break. Take your vacation. Your inbox will still be there when you get back, waiting patiently to ruin your day — but at least you’ll be rested enough to laugh at it.
Like what you read? I write, rewrite, overthink, rewrite again, and eventually post these things in hopes they resonate. If something struck a chord, sparked an idea, or — most importantly — made you laugh, please drop a comment below. Sarcasm is welcome, cruelty is not. So be honest, and be nice. It’s possible to do both.
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