It may seem like another piece of cognitive dissonance—to get more engaged and productive, you need to apparently move in the opposite direction and detach from work. A growing number of research studies demonstrate that detaching from work is essential to enhanced productivity. The work of Sabine Sonnentag (Universität Konstanz in Germany) has also shown that people who detach regularly are more likely to have higher engagement levels at work and recover better from job stress.
In this interview, she describes how “a high level of recovery and work engagement seem to reinforce each other”: