Name: Vacation hoarding.

Age: Recent, but growing.

Appearance: Needlessly exhausted.

Speaking of exhausted, you look shattered today. I am. I haven’t had a day off work for 11 months.

What about your annual leave? Oh, I don’t worry about that. I am a “vacation hoarder”.

How convenient. And also how stupid. Why don’t you take any annual leave? You’d be staggered at how many people don’t. Last year it was estimated that just 35% of British workers took all of their entitled leave. Indeed, two in five workers take less annual leave now than they did before the pandemic.

Wow, people must really love work. Well, sure. But that’s not really the issue.

Is the issue that they want to take all their time off in one big lump, so they can properly unwind? Sometimes. But that’s not really it, either.

So it must be that the labour market is such a hellish treadmill of unending brutality that people don’t even feel safe taking their legally allocated days off. Bingo.

That’s depressing. Don’t act surprised. Look around you at the overworked, dead-eyed husks who toil around the clock in the mistaken belief that their careers might be harmed if they demonstrate even a hint of having a life outside office hours.

Sir, that’s a mirror. My point still stands. There are real risks to not taking all your annual leave. The same study found that 81% of workers agree that not having a day off for months leaves them with burnout, exhaustion and poor mental health.

Yikes. And it’s bad news for employers, too, since it has been reported that using all your annual leave can boost productivity by up to 40% and reduce the risk of taking sick leave by 28%.

To be clear, we’re talking about UK annual leave. Yes, about 30 days a year. In the US, there is no statutory paid annual leave – any allocated paid leave is entirely at the discretion of employers, but, even then, US workers forfeited 765 million days of leave in 2023 alone.

So the message is that annual leave is good for everyone? Yes, and – it’s foolish to ignore it.

Besides, you can use that time off to catch up on work. Wait! No! I mean, sure, 57% of workers say they do exactly that “sometimes’ or “often”, because they’re scared it will reflect badly on them if they don’t. But don’t!

So just … do nothing? Yes! It’s good for you. Try it now.

Tried it. Started panicking about my mortality. Hated it. OK, back to work.

Do say: “Please take all your available annual leave.”

Don’t say: “But book a hotel with reliable wifi – I need the Q3 report next week.”