The Price of Never Fully Switching Off on Leave

Nobody calls it working. It is a glance at the phone over breakfast, a reply of two lines from the beach, a quick confirmation that yes, the file is in the shared folder. Ten minutes a day, perhaps less. By most measures the person is on leave. The leave form was approved, the days were deducted, the out-of-office is on.

And yet something about the break does not quite arrive. This piece is about that gap: leave that is taken on paper but only partly received, and the systems and habits that keep people half-connected. It is not about owners who cannot leave the business at all, which Mellorca has written about elsewhere. It is about the much more common case of a capable employee or manager who is technically off, but never fully so.

Leave is meant to be time away

South African law treats annual leave as a real entitlement, not a scheduling convenience. The Department of Employment and Labour's guide to annual leave under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act sets out a minimum of 21 consecutive days a year, or one day for every 17 days worked by agreement. Leave must be granted within six months of the end of the leave cycle, and employers may not pay employees instead of granting leave, except when employment ends.

That last rule is telling. The law does not allow leave to be cashed in during employment, which suggests the point is the time away itself. Leave that is half-spent on work is still counted as leave. Whether it does what leave is for is a different question.

The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization, in a 2022 technical brief on healthy and safe teleworking, recommended that employers establish a right to disconnect and agree on a common system to signal availability for work, with managers and colleagues respecting it. Their brief was about teleworking rather than leave, but the principle applies: being unavailable only works if the system around the person treats it as real.

Why the small contact adds up

The cost of partial contact is not mainly the minutes spent. It is what each contact does to the rest of the day. A two-line reply can reopen a problem, prompt a follow-up and leave a question hanging until the next check. The person may spend more of the day thinking about work than the ten minutes suggest.

That is offered as a reasonable reading of the mechanism rather than a measured finding. People differ. Some find that a short daily check settles them, and that not knowing would be worse. The concern here is not with that choice. It is with the case where the person has no real choice, because work will stall or go wrong without them.

An illustrative leave

Consider an illustrative example: the senior bookkeeper at a Cape Town property management company with twenty-five staff, taking two weeks in December. It is a hypothetical scenario. She briefs a colleague before leaving. But the colleague does not have access to one of the bank portals, the month-end accruals depend on a spreadsheet only she understands, and two landlords are used to emailing her directly.

No one intends to disturb her. But on day two the colleague messages to ask where a reconciliation file is. On day four a landlord's query is forwarded "just so you're aware". On day six there is a short call about an accrual. Each contact is polite and brief. By the end of the fortnight she has worked perhaps three hours in total, spread across ten days, and has not had a single day entirely free of the office.

The human tax: presence, energy and autonomy

Presence is the first tax. Even on days without contact, part of her attention may stay with the office, waiting for the next message. That is the inference; we do not know how any particular person experiences it.

Energy is the second. Leave is one of the main ways people recover from the working year. If the break is repeatedly interrupted, it is reasonable to expect that less recovery happens, though the size of that effect will vary from person to person.

Autonomy is the third, and perhaps the most important. The question of how connected to be on leave has been answered for her, by how the work was set up before she left. She did not decide to be half-on. The arrangement decided.

What keeps people half-connected

When the contacts in our illustration are traced back, almost none of them are really about the person on leave. They are about the system she left behind:

Access that only one person holds. A bank portal, a supplier login, an admin password.
Knowledge held in one head or one file. A spreadsheet whose logic is not written down. Mellorca's pattern on the process that only works because someone remembers describes this well.
Relationships routed to a person rather than a role. Customers or suppliers who email an individual address.
No agreed threshold for contact. Colleagues do not know what justifies a message, so they err on the side of asking.

What could realistically change

Agree the contact rules before leave. What would justify contact, who decides, and by which single channel. Many people are happy to be reached for a genuine emergency; fewer want to be asked where a file is.
Let the person choose their level. Some will want no contact at all. Some will prefer a fixed ten-minute check on one day. The point is that it is their decision, written down and respected.
Hand over access, not just tasks. Cover needs the logins, permissions and authorities to act, granted properly and removed afterwards.
Write the handover so it does not depend on memory. Mellorca's guide on designing a handoff that cannot depend on memory covers what a good handover contains.
Hold non-urgent messages until the return. Colleagues can schedule messages to arrive later. Microsoft's Outlook support documentation, for example, explains how to schedule a message or set "do not deliver before" so it stays in drafts or the outbox until the chosen time.

The planned-absence version of this problem, where the handover gap is much larger, is explored in when parental leave means handing over an undocumented job.

What changes first, and the business outcome

The first change is that the questions stop arriving, because the colleague can answer them. Access was transferred, the spreadsheet logic was written down, and the landlords were told who to contact.

The business becomes less dependent on one person being reachable, which helps in illness, resignation and growth as well as on holiday. Cover staff learn more of the job, and the business finds out where its knowledge was too concentrated.

The human dividend

The dividends are presence and autonomy. Presence, because the person can be where they are, whether that is with family, travelling, reading or simply resting. Autonomy, because the level of contact on leave becomes a choice they make, not one the arrangement makes for them.

The dividend is not a particular kind of holiday. Someone who chooses to keep an eye on things has lost nothing. Someone who chooses to switch off completely now can. Mellorca's earlier piece on why holidays still need a laptop in the suitcase looks at the same freedom from the owner's side.

The trade-offs

Some decisions will wait or be made differently. Without contact, cover staff will occasionally make a call the person on leave would not have made.
Handover takes time before leave. The days before a break may become busier, which can feel like a cost of its own.
Shared access carries risk. Giving cover staff logins and authority must be done carefully and reversed afterwards.
A no-contact rule can create anxiety. For some people, not knowing is harder than a brief check. The rule should follow the person's choice.
Some roles cannot be fully covered. In a very small business there may be no one else. Then the honest option is to plan leave around quieter periods and agree a minimal, predictable check-in.

Why it matters

Leave is one of the few times in a working year that is meant to belong entirely to the person. When it leaks back to work in small pieces, the cost is easy to dismiss because each piece is small. The change worth making is not to forbid contact. It is to make leave something the person actually receives, on terms they choose.

Sources and further reading

Basic Guide to Annual Leave (last verified 10 October 2026)
Crucial changes needed to protect workers’ health while teleworking (last verified 10 October 2026)
Delay or schedule sending email messages in Outlook - Microsoft Support (last verified 10 October 2026)