Having just returned from our annual family skiing trip, I find myself once again struck by a paradox: six hours a day on the slopes leaves your legs aching and your lungs burning, yet you come back to the office not depleted but genuinely recharged. The physical exhaustion is real, but the cognitive renewal is more real still. This year, however, I found myself reflecting less on how I had recovered, and more on why it had worked so well — and the answer had little to do with the mountain air.
It had to do with the fact that, for several consecutive days, I had simply stopped thinking about work altogether.
At business school, we talk a great deal about how to manage our energy. We discuss sleep hygiene, nutrition, the perils of excessive business travel, and the importance of exercise. All of that is valid and important; and indeed I have written about how to manage your energy in a global role before. But there is a prior, and perhaps more fundamental, question that we tend to gloss over: are we actually allowing ourselves to switch off in the first place?
The always-on trap is especially acute in global roles
For professionals in globally distributed roles, the structural conditions for full disconnection are almost never in place. When you manage a team spread across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, there is always, quite literally, someone awake. There is always a message arriving, a decision that could be escalated, a cultural misunderstanding that requires your attention. The time zone burden that so many global professionals carry does not merely extend the working day — it colonizes the evening, the weekend, and eventually the holiday.
The result is a kind of chronic partial attention that we have come to normalize. We are physically present at the dinner table but mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s call with Singapore. We are technically on holiday but keep one eye on the inbox, just in case. We tell ourselves this is responsible, even necessary. In practice, it means we never fully recover.
Researchers refer to this as a failure of psychological detachment, the mental experience of being truly away from work during non-work time. Sabine Sonnentag, one of the leading scholars on workplace recovery, has shown in a series of studies that employees who achieve genuine psychological detachment during their off-hours return to work with higher levels of engagement, better emotional regulation, and stronger job performance. Crucially, detachment does not make people less committed to their work, it makes them more effective at it. The irony, then, is that the global professional who never fully switches off may be undermining the very performance they are trying to protect.
Why detachment is harder than it sounds
Of course, knowing that you should detach and actually detaching are two different things. Research suggests that it is precisely those workers who are most involved in demanding, high-stakes jobs – the profile that fits many global roles – who find psychological detachment hardest to achieve. Job stressors, a strong sense of professional identity, and a fear of missing something important all conspire to keep the mind tethered to work long after the laptop has been closed.
Technology has made all of this considerably worse. As Paul Leonardi details in his brilliant book Digital Exhaustion, evidence tells us time and again that even the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk, face down, switched to silent, measurably reduces available cognitive capacity. We do not even need to be actively checking our devices for them to occupy mental bandwidth. For global professionals who are conditioned to see their phone as the primary instrument through which global teams are held together, the psychological cost of simply having the device nearby may be substantial.
Strategic idleness as a performance tool
What skiing imposes, that most leisure activities do not, is a kind of enforced presence. You cannot navigate a steep slope while composing a reply to an email. The physical and attentional demands of the activity create what researchers call a mastery experience, an absorbing challenge that crowds out work-related thought not through suppression but through genuine displacement. The mind is fully occupied, just not with work. This is categorically different from lying on a beach half-reading a novel while notifications accumulate on your phone.
The implication for global professionals is not that everyone needs to take up skiing. It is that the most effective form of recovery is not passive rest but an active, absorbing engagement in something that has nothing to do with work. This might be sport, music, cooking, gardening, or any number of other pursuits, provided they genuinely capture your attention and are accompanied by an honest commitment to leave work behind.
Companies can play a meaningful role here too. Daimler’s well-known policy of automatically deleting emails sent to employees on holiday (and notifying the sender accordingly) is one example of a structural intervention that removes the temptation and the guilt associated with disconnecting. Managers who visibly model recovery behaviors, and who refrain from contacting team members during their personal time, send a powerful signal about what the organization actually values, as opposed to what it merely says it values.
The competitive advantage of knowing when to stop
There is a reason that high-performance athletes build recovery phases into their training schedules as deliberately as they build in the training itself. Continuous exertion without recovery does not build strength, it causes injury. The same logic applies to cognitive performance, and it applies with particular force to the kind of sustained, high-complexity work that global roles demand.
Strategic idleness, the deliberate, unapologetic decision to disconnect fully and regularly, is not a concession to laziness. It is a professional discipline. The global professional who masters it does not fall behind their always-on peers. Over time, they outperform them.
The mountains helped me remember that this year. I hope I can hold onto the lesson a little longer than last time😊