Pallavi Varma often works six or seven days a week on call as part of her job working for a travel company. The 24-year-old Indian content creator works hard while juggling her studies at a local university.

And sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

“I sometimes find the need to catch up with work on Sundays or on public holidays in order to make up for lost time,” she says.

She doesn’t feel too bad about doing so – it allows her to work more efficiently, she reckons, because she feels less pressure when she’s not working in an office environment. “My results are vastly improved when I work on my downtime,” Varma says.

She’s not the only one. Nutrition and fitness expert Tom Jenane, who lives in Brighton in the UK, took his first holiday to catch up on work last year. He was juggling other duties alongside writing descriptions of the products sold at the company he works for, and found he just wasn’t getting it all done during his working day.

“I took the day off to sit at home and write up the product descriptions,” he says. “I woke up naturally, made myself a coffee and set myself up on the sofa with the laptop, playing music in the background.”

Away from the distractions of a pinging inbox, watercooler chat with colleagues and the stresses of office life, the work Jenane, 31, had been struggling with for ages took him a day to complete.

But it required him to use up a precious day’s annual leave.

Jenane and Varma exemplify leaveism - where employees feel compelled to take use their time off to catch up on their workload, free from the distractions of the office.