There is a lot of advice around work-life balance, and most of it makes perfect sense. Work should stay at work, holidays should be holidays, and laptops should ideally have no place in a hotel room. Except that real life does not always work that way. There are weeks when work takes over, days when you are not necessarily working every minute but still need to be available, and times when you have very little leave left but could really do with a change of scene.
That was the thought behind a slightly unusual experiment we tried with our team. When Taj Mahal, New Delhi invited us to spend some time at the property, we wondered what would happen if we treated it as a workcation rather than a conventional holiday. The laptop came along, the calls stayed on the schedule, and the work still had to get done. The only thing we changed was where she was doing it. And that turned out to make quite a difference.
So we picked the most overworked person on our team, our growth manager Niharika Rana, gave her 24 hours at the hotel and told her to carry on with her work as usual.
Dinner followed, with more food and time to relax before she eventually went back to her room. And that was perhaps the nicest part of the evening. Of course, you do not have to spend your entire stay working. If you have time, there is a pool, spa, several dining options, and plenty of space in the hotel to sit back for a while. The restaurants offer Chinese, Italian, and Indian cuisine, so food can easily become part of the reason to stay a little longer. The hotel also has a collection of themed suites that draw from different parts of India’s artistic and cultural history. The Nizam Suite, Travancore Suite, Ikkat Suite and R.K. Laxman Suite each have their own design story, with art, furnishings and details connected to the person, region or tradition they reference. What stayed with me after Niharika came back was how little actually needed to change for a normal working day to feel different. She had not taken leave. She had not switched off her phone. She had not abandoned her laptop or ignored her deadlines. There was good food waiting for her, a comfortable room to work from, an evening outside the room, a proper bed to sleep in, breakfast in bed the next morning and enough time for a long bath before heading home. Here’s what to know about the Grand Train Tour
She simply spent those 24 hours somewhere that made the workday feel less repetitive. Destination Buzz: Planning a Switzerland train holiday in 2026? Because there was still a commute ahead, there was no drive home, no traffic to deal with and no second round of work waiting simply.
Because niharika is vegan, food was another thing we were curious about. Because she was not trying to fit the hotel stay around a commute, household chores or the usual weekday routine, the day had more breathing space simply. The room had enough space for the day to naturally break into different parts. There was a dedicated study table next to the bedroom, a small armchair and a large double bed, along with a separate closet area. The bathroom had a rain shower and a large sink, and the whole space had that slightly strange but very pleasant quality of feeling like a home you had borrowed for a day, only with hotel staff looking after everything. Anyone with a specific dietary preference knows that hotel dining can sometimes become a slightly repetitive affair, with the same few safe options appearing on the menu. Instead of finishing a call and immediately moving on to the next task at home, there was a comfortable room to sit in, a meal waiting, a view outside the window and the knowledge that there was nowhere she needed to rush off to.
