HRConfidential: The Dark Truth Behind End-of-Year PTO

Why You Probably Shouldn’t Take PTO During the Holidays

(And what you should do instead)

Before anything else, let me be very clear: this is not for everyone.

I made this video on Tiktok a few years ago and it went super viral and my comments were filled with "but this doesn't work with xxx." 

I Know, I know, I know. 

Here's the disclaimer:  Not every job, not every industry, not every company, not every life situation - this is for a general majority of corporate roles that do not close between Christmas and New Years. 

And for a lot of people in those roles, taking PTO during the holidays is a very common tradition and since most people have 12-15 PTO days during the year, most of us take 8-10 for 11 months (which is really not enough to destress) than save the balance to take the last 2 weeks of the year to just relax. 

For the first six years of my corporate career, I did what everyone else did. It was just assumed you took off the last week or two of December. Everyone was gone anyway. Nothing important happened. I worked in fairly niche areas of HR, and no one really cared about filing leaves of absence between Christmas and New Year’s. I’d usually start my PTO around the 18th or 19th, burn five or six days, enjoy the built-in company holidays, and call it a win. It wasn’t even a conscious choice. It was just the default and then suffer the same growing dread as the end of December arrived and I'd have to deal with all of that "back to work" discomfort.

That changed when I joined WebMD as an HR Manager in 2008, which was the first relatively large company I worked for.

They had a tradition: whoever was the most recently hired person handled holiday coverage. That person was me.

I was annoyed. I’d started late in the year, and while they did allow some rollover, I was still going to lose a day or two of PTO. I remember being frustrated and already planning to push back, at least to force them to let me take the 30th or the 31st. I felt like I was getting screwed.

Instead, something unexpected happened. Those days turned out to be like uncovering a massive secret 

I’d go into the office for an hour or two, handle anything that actually needed coverage, clean a few things up, and then leave. The office was quiet, almost empty. I remember it was snowing, and there was something oddly peaceful about being there. Yes, it got dark early, and yes, winter depression still showed up around four in the afternoon, but the work itself was light. Calm. Manageable.

That’s when it clicked. This was actually much better.

For a lot of corporate roles, the last two weeks of December are some of the quietest of the year. Meetings disappear or get shortened. Decisions are delayed. Emails slow down. Leaders are checked out. Clients aren’t pushing timelines. The pace drops dramatically.

Working during that time doesn’t usually feel draining. It doesn’t demand constant context-switching or high performance. It creates a strange kind of low-stress momentum. And that’s exactly why taking PTO then can be a waste. 

The purpose of PTO isn’t just to be away from work. It’s to recover from work.

Taking time off when work is already quiet doesn’t remove much stress, because there isn’t much stress to remove. What it does do is leave you with fewer days when things ramp back up.

Once I stopped using all my PTO at the end of the year, I started saving it for periods when I actually needed it. When meetings were nonstop. When projects piled up. When I could truly disconnect without guilt or anxiety.

Mid-year PTO felt completely different. People could cover for me. Work kept moving. I didn’t come back to a wall of dread. I also avoided that uniquely awful feeling of taking a long holiday break and then experiencing the emotional crash of the first day back.

This matters even more if you’re job searching. December is already slow for hiring. Taking PTO during that time doesn’t speed anything up, doesn’t protect you from rejection, and doesn’t create opportunities. January is when budgets reset, hiring plans reopen, recruiters come back, and momentum starts again. Having PTO available then is often far more useful.

For many corporate workers instead of saving almost half of your PTO allotment (which the execs love since it's burned days) a better strategy looks like this: work lightly during the holidays, use the quiet to catch up or coast, and save PTO for times when work intensity is actually high. Take time off when rest will do the most work.

If this advice doesn’t apply to you, that’s okay. It was never meant to. But if you’ve ever taken PTO during the holidays and returned to work feeling just as tired, this might explain why.

However you are spending the last weeks of December - I hope it does bring you joy and rest!

DanFromHR