Have You Ever Taken Leave Just to Get Work Done?
- #career
- #productivity
- #work
- #leadership
Recently, I came across a story that stopped me for a moment.
An employee took leave from work.
Not to travel.
Not to spend time with family.
Not to rest.
He took leave to finish his office work.
Think about that for a second.
The place designed for work had become the worst place to actually get work done.
And honestly, the more I thought about it, the less surprising it felt.
The day disappears before the work begins
Most knowledge workers don't spend their days building, designing, writing, or solving problems.
Instead, the day often looks something like this:
- Morning standup
- Quick sync meeting
- Client call
- Slack notifications
- Teams notifications
- Follow-up discussion
- Another "quick" call
- Status update meeting
Before you know it, it is 5 PM.
You have been busy all day.
Yet the task that actually mattered is still sitting untouched.
As a software engineer, I have experienced this firsthand.
Some of my most productive work has happened during early mornings, late evenings, or weekends—not because those are ideal working hours, but because nobody is interrupting me.
Busy is not the same as productive
One of the biggest misconceptions in modern workplaces is equating activity with progress.
A calendar packed with meetings looks productive.
A constant stream of messages feels productive.
Instant replies appear efficient.
But none of those things necessarily create value.
When I work on products—whether it is fintech platforms like ShareBigya and Bigya PMS, AI products, or mobile applications—real progress rarely comes from meetings.
Real progress comes from uninterrupted thinking.
The architecture decisions.
The debugging sessions.
The problem-solving.
The moments where you sit with a challenge long enough to understand it properly.
Those moments require focus.
And focus requires time.
The hidden cost of interruptions
Most interruptions feel harmless.
A quick question.
A quick message.
A quick call.
The problem is that attention does not switch instantly.
If I am deep inside a complex feature and someone interrupts me for five minutes, the interruption often costs much more than five minutes.
I need to rebuild context.
Remember what I was doing.
Reload the mental model.
Find my train of thought again.
That hidden cost accumulates throughout the day.
The result is something many professionals know all too well:
"My actual work starts after everyone else logs off."
That sentence has become so common that we barely question it anymore.
Maybe we should.
More meetings rarely solve the problem
When projects fall behind, the default reaction is often:
Let's schedule another meeting.
Ironically, that solution can make the problem worse.
Most teams do not suffer from a lack of communication.
They suffer from a lack of uninterrupted execution time.
Communication is important.
Alignment matters.
But there is a point where collaboration starts competing with actual work.
The best teams I have worked with understood this balance.
They communicated clearly, then got out of each other's way.
A better workplace design
I do not think the solution is working harder.
I think the solution is designing work differently.
Less emphasis on being constantly available.
More emphasis on producing meaningful outcomes.
A few shifts can make a huge difference:
❌ More meetings
✅ More thinking time
❌ Instant responses to everything
✅ Protected focus blocks
❌ Measuring activity
✅ Measuring outcomes
❌ Rewarding busyness
✅ Rewarding impact
The goal should not be to keep people occupied.
The goal should be to help people create value.
The best work happens in clarity
Looking back, almost every meaningful thing I have built happened during periods of deep focus.
Not during meetings.
Not while responding to notifications.
Not while multitasking.
Whether it was building fintech products, shipping mobile applications, or launching new features, the biggest breakthroughs came from uninterrupted time spent thinking and building.
That is why the story of someone taking leave to finish work feels both absurd and strangely familiar.
It highlights a problem many workplaces have quietly accepted.
The issue is not that people are unwilling to work.
The issue is that we often create environments where focused work becomes difficult.
And when that happens, people start looking for peace in the only place they can find it: outside of work.
So I'll leave you with the same question that made me think.