# Story 2: The rise of 'micro-retirements'

- **Episode:** [178](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/178.md) (2025-03-11)
- **Type:** news-roundup
- **Tags:** micro-retirements, career-breaks, work-life-balance, retirement-trends
- **Time:** 9:57–18:00 (start 597s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/178?t=597](https://truthliesandwork.com/178?t=597)

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[9:57] Al Elliott: Well, there was a few articles I saw recently about this, what people are saying, this new workplace trend called micro-retirement. And basically the article's saying that's where Gen Z and millennials take extended breaks from work, a few months or even a year off, and then come back to the workforce. Now, just to be real for a second, this is not new. Stop, stop saying old things are new. Stop giving them a new name and saying they're new. We've had sabbaticals for ages. In fact, fun fact, when I was doing the research on this, The word sabbatical comes from the Book of Leviticus. I'm sorry, I'm not a big Bible follower. Leviticus, I think, where they let fields lie fallow every 7th year to recover. The same principle sort of applies here where people are letting their mental fields recover, I suppose, before they burn out completely. According to some research from the Kemmy Business School in Ireland, a massive 65% of Gen Z and millennials prioritise work-life balance over career progression. We've already said that. We've said that many, many times on this, on this little pod. But what they're essentially asking is, is the juice worth the squeeze? And when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder, many of them are saying no, it really isn't. I mean, technology is always gonna be to blame. It's potentially with this always-on culture, you know, you feel like you're never truly away from work, you know, checking emails at 10 o'clock, that sort of thing. Interestingly, this is a big problem in Ireland, where it is apparently ranked amongst the highest in Europe for for employee burnout in a recent study. I don't know whether there's any correlation because there's a lot of big tech companies based in Dublin
[11:24] Leanne Elliott: Ooh
[11:24] Al Elliott: So I'm wondering if that's skewing it. I don't know. But anyway, from a business owner's point of view, I can see how this might send some executives or owners into a bit of a panic, worrying that their top guys are gonna disappear for 6 months to Bali. They're gonna meditate, drink smoothies, and wear ridiculous clothes. We've been to Bali. Don't go to Bali. It's not a great place. But anyway, here's the thing. Maybe we should be thinking about this slightly differently. The article suggests— now this is where I had to do some research— the article suggests that organisations consider something they call a triple transition approach. So I didn't really understand what this was, so I did some digging. Now traditionally, forward-thinking companies have been focusing on 2 big transitions over the last few years: going digital, so as I said, putting everything in the cloud, automation, and obviously it's going to be AI agents at this point, and becoming sustainable, reducing carbon footprints, ethical sourcing, You know, the whole green agenda. But this research suggests that in 2025, businesses should have a 3rd transition that they're looking to, they're looking to prioritise, which is genuine work-life balance. Not the typical ping pong, pizzas Friday, free fruit, all that kind of stuff, but genuine actual changes like truly flexible schedules or proper career paths that don't require 60-hour work weeks, or even building in these sabbatical programmes from the actual get-go. I suppose it's acknowledging that— I mean, sorry, I'm going to quote from the article here because this was a good line. It's acknowledging that human sustainability is just as important as environmental sustainability. I thought that was a really good line. The reality is that when your best employees are literally walking out the door for months at a time because they're burnt out and they've had enough, something's clearly broken in the way that your organisation is being run. Now, you can either dismiss this as a trend and potentially lose people, as Leanne was just saying there
[13:07] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[13:07] Al Elliott: Um, 30% voluntary, uh, attrition, I think you said, didn't you?
[13:11] Leanne Elliott: Mm-hmm
[13:12] Al Elliott: Or you can adapt and potentially gain a competitive advantage by attracting the best people and acknowledging, A, that they shouldn't be working so hard, and B, why not just disappear off whenever you want? You, there is a, there was a company we had recently who were talking about every number of years they built up credit to go and have a sabbatical. Do you remember anything? Remember that? What that was?
[13:31] Leanne Elliott: No
[13:31] Al Elliott: Might have been Basecamp. I can't remember, but I'll, I'll try and find it and try and put it in the show notes. So I think the key message we're getting out of this is that obviously this needs to be a change, but also senior leaders need to model this business, this idea themselves. As Leanne said, if CEOs are sending emails at midnight, it doesn't matter what your policy says, this becomes the real culture. So the bottom line is this: if people are willing to walk away from their paychecks to recover, it's a pretty strong signal we're doing something wrong with work. What do you think, Lee?
[13:59] Leanne Elliott: It's no great Surprise. When we factor in that Gen Z, young millennials— what's the average age? Is probably going to be 100 now. They could have like a 70-year career. It's not physically or psychologically possible to work at that rate for that long. So it's— it sounds like a very sensible adaptive behavior that people are finding to make work more sustainable For a longer period of time, longer throughout their lives. People will always find their own way to regain some kind of sense of control, meaning, and purpose over their work and life. You can beat your fists and demand people come back into the office. You can demand that people work a 60-hour work week and are in the office at least 5 days a week, whatever Google was chatting about last week. You can do all of these things in terms of sending emails like Elon Musk is doing, saying Tell me what you do, why justify your job. You can do all of that, but that doesn't remove my agency to go, I've had enough. Thanks though, I'm done. And I think what this is a really good example of is an actually quite extreme response to extreme leadership behaviours we're seeing in the workplace. We're not having much choice in terms of being able to integrate our work and life in a way that is healthy. So let's just semi-retire. for a year and then come back and do it again and then come back and do it again. And another thing that I've seen more of recently, and I think it's through this whole narrative of more masculine energy in the workplace, is lots more analogies being brought up in terms of sports. Like, oh, you don't see the greatest sports people sacking off. You don't see them skipping a day of training to work from home. You didn't see them doing that. Let's not forget, the average sports person probably retires at about 30. 35. They have a very short, sharp, intense career. So yeah, they can do that for that period of time, but ultimately that's where sports people retire because they're physically and/or psychologically exhausted. So it's not— it's a good analogy to kind of bring in lessons and transferable ideas, but it's not a like-for-like. I applaud it. We've been semi-retired for a few years now, um, different peaks and troughs in terms of how busy we are with work. And it is much more sustainable. It gives us much— since we've been doing it, I would say, what do you think, 2020, kind of COVID stopped us a bit, didn't it, in our tracks and kind of slowed us down a little bit and enabled us to reflect a bit more. And since that time, we've been much more innovative, much more creative. We've achieved so much in the past 5 years. That it's, I think it's more than the 5 years previous when we were both hustling a lot
[16:47] Al Elliott: Yeah. And I think what's interesting about that is that we, what I have noticed with us is that if we might, we might have 2 weeks where we just, you know, do the bare minimum. And I don't mean that with no effort. We do it with lots of care and love, but we do stuff. And then we might have 3 weeks, like a sprint where we'll do something and stuff will just get done. And you're like, how the hell have I got all my to-do lists? You're still at 8 o'clock at night, you're still working. But then we have 2 weeks, and then over summer we tend to try and have 2 weeks off, 3 weeks off, possibly 4 if we can do it. We get a bit bored after a while. But I think the point is, like Leanne's saying, is that if you expect everyone to be on, it's like, you know, if you go and buy a piece of equipment and you run it 24/7, then you're going to end up having to buy a new piece of equipment much sooner than if you ran it for 8 hours of the day. It's the same here with people, I think, is that you can't expect people to put in 100% for 80, 90, even 60 hours a week. The fact is that there's lots of research out there that show that if you, if you work really hard for 40 hours a week or even 8 hours a day, really there's only 2 hours a day when you're actually gonna produce exceptional work. The remainder of the time, especially if you, those first 2 hours in the morning, great. Remainder of the time is probably just doing the tasks. And let's be honest, most of our to-do list is just pleasing other people, isn't it? Leanne, what else have you seen, my love?