Your holiday entitlement is as much part of your package as your salary or your CPF. In fact, not taking a break once in awhile amounts to taking a pay cut. It’s also good to remind yourself that good employers should want you to take holidays – less you burn-out and they’re left hanging.

Remember, you’ve already booked and paid for your transport and accommodation so there’s no point worrying about what’s going on at the office. If you can’t relax on holiday, you are likely to be less productive and more likely to suffer from stress and burn-out when you return.

If you must check your emails, do so only once a day and ideally at night so this way, it won’t ruin your time with family and friends. Looking at emails at night is also a good way to ensure that you won’t be tempted to engage.

Not giving yourself a proper holiday could have worse repercussions than just a ticking off from the boss. If you work long hours, you will get ill in one form or another. In fact, research has shown that too much work can cause cardiovascular problems, cancer, gastro-intestinal disease and more.

You are not indispensable. While you are away, other people will cover for you, in much the same way as you cover for them. But, this does not mean that Emily from sales will get your job because if she was the right person, she would already have that position so two weeks away on holiday is not going to change this.

Some people think that being on holiday is just as stressful as being at work. This mindset needs to change. Psychologists actually advocate people thinking about holidays as something important in their own right rather than as a break from a tasks that require a higher level of intelligence.

Tell people well in advance that you are going to be out of the office. It’s much less stressful to warn them than have them find out when you’re already gone. Set up an out-of-office email too, so that people know you’re unavailable to deal with work issues.

Too many work-related messages – whether they’re sent by email or another means – are simply irrelevant. Take social media as an example, most of it is just not very important and after a day or two, what was trending then would have been completely forgotten in favour of fresher, more exciting news.