Have you ever felt burned out at work when you came back from vacation?

I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Disney World. I’m talking about how you knew the whole time walking around Epcot Center that a world of work was waiting upon your return.

Can I say something?

Our vacation systems are completely busted.

They don’t work.

The classic corporate vacation system goes like this: You get a set number of vacation days a year, you fill out some form photocopied from 1988 to apply for time off, you get your boss’s signature and file it with a team assistant or log it into some terrible database. It’s an admin headache and that doesn’t even include the frantic cramming of extra work into the week before you go away.

What a nightmare!

It’s no wonder absenteeism remains a massive problem for most companies, with payrolls dotted with sick leaves, disability leaves, and stress leaves. In the U.K., the Department for Work and Pensions says absenteeism costs their economy more than 100 billion pounds ($162 billion) a year. And a white-paper published at The Workforce Institute and produced by Circadian, a workforce solution company, calls absenteeism a bottom-line killer that costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee and $2,650 per salaried employee per year.

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Would it help if we got more paid vacation?

Not necessarily.

According to a study done by an organization called Project: Time Off together with GfK, a market research firm, just more than 40 per cent of us don’t plan to use all our paid time off, anyway. The biggest reason? “Fear of returning to a mountain of work.”

So what’s the progressive approach?

It’s the Adobe, Netflix, or Twitter policies that say “take as much vacation as you want, whenever you want it.” Open-ended, unlimited vacation — sounds great on paper, doesn’t it? Very progressive, right? No, it’s broken too. What happens in practice? Warrior mentality. Peer pressure. Social signals that say you’re a slacker if you’re not in the office.

German Tech company Travis CI CEO Mathias Meyer wrote about his company ultimately abandoning unlimited vacation because: “When people are uncertain about how many days it’s OK to take off, you’ll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.” (He decided to try minimum vacation time, instead.)

The point is in unlimited vacation time systems you don’t actually take a few weeks to travel through South America after your wedding, because there’s too much social pressure against going away for so long. s

So what’s the solution?

Recurring, scheduled, mandatory vacation.

Yes, that’s right — an entirely new approach to managing vacation. And one that preliminary research shows works much more effectively.

Famed designer Stefan Sagmeister said in his TED Talk, “The Power of Time Off,” that every seven years, he takes one year off. “In that year,” he said, “we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.” He does warn that the sabbaticals take a lot of planning and benefit most after you’ve worked a significant amount of time.

Why does he do this? He says, “Right now we spend about the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there are another 40 years that are really reserved for working. And then — tacked on at the end of it — are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years.”

As he says, that one year is the source of his creativity, inspiration, and ideas for the next seven years.

So I recently partnered with Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, a global aviation strategy firm of about 10 people, and we asked ourselves a question:

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“What if we force people to take a scheduled week off every seven weeks?”

The idea was that this would be a microcosm of the Sagmeister principle of one year off every seven years. And it’s entirely mandatory. In fact, we designed it so that if you contact the office while you’re on vacation via email, WhatsApp, Slack messages, or anything, you don’t get paid for that vacation week. We tried to build in a financial punishment for working when you aren’t supposed to be working in order to establish a norm about disconnecting from the office.

The system is designed so you don’t get a say in when you go. Some may say that’s the downside, but for this experiment we outlined the benefits as helping put a structure in place. The team and clients would know well ahead of time when someone would be taking a week off. And the point is you actually go. And everybody goes. So there are no questions, paperwork, or guilt involved with not being at the office.

After this experiment was in place for 12 weeks, we had managers rate employee productivity, creativity, and happiness levels before and after mandatory time off. And what did we find out?

Creativity went up 33 per cent, happiness levels rose by 25 per cent and productivity increased 13 per cent. In some cases, returning team members were able to produce detailed standard operating procedure documents in a day as opposed to over two days.

What did people do with their time off? Employees wrote blog posts talking about how they finally found time to cross things off their bucket lists. Finally holding an art exhibition, learning a new language, or travelling somewhere they’d never been before.

Now this is a small company, and we haven’t tested the results in a large organization. But the question is: could something this simple work in your workplace?

There were two points of constructive feedback that came back from the test:

1. Frequency was too high. Employees found that once every seven weeks (while beautiful on paper) was just too frequent for a small company. Its competitive advantage is agility and having staff off too often upset the work rhythm. CEO Shashank Nigam proposed taking vacation every 12 weeks. But with employee input, we redesigned it to once every eight weeks. That’s where it stands now.

2. Staggering was important. Let’s say that two or three people work together on a project team. We found that it didn’t make sense for these people to take back-to-back time off. Batons get dropped if there are consecutive absences. We revised the arrangement so that no one can take a week off right after someone has just come back from one. So the high-level design is important and needs to work for the business.

This is still early research, but it confirms something I believe in passionately after a decade working in HR: Vacation systems are broken, and aren’t actually doing what they’re supposed to do. If you show up drained after your vacation, that means you didn’t get the benefit of creating space.

Why is creating space so important?

Consider this quote from Tim Kreider, who wrote “The Busy Trap” for The New York Times:

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Fix your vacation system.

You’ll be doing better, more important work.

Neil Pasricha is the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation. His new journal Two-Minute Mornings contains his exact two-minute practice for starting each day. His bi-weekly column helps us live a good life.