The obstacle is rarely the work itself. It is the belief that being unavailable is a failure of service, which produces owners who take a laptop and answer messages from a holiday, achieving neither rest nor the reassurance they were seeking. Customers overwhelmingly accept a stated absence and react badly to unexplained silence, which are different things.
Give notice proportionate to the length. A week away needs a fortnight of warning to anybody with active work. Anything longer deserves a month, and a message sent early lets people bring forward what they need rather than discovering the gap when they want something. Nearly all friction here comes from the announcement rather than the absence.
Set the out of office to be useful rather than apologetic. State the dates, when you will respond, and what somebody should do if it genuinely cannot wait. A phone number for emergencies, or a named person if you have one, converts an absence into an arrangement. What fails is a message saying you have limited access, which tells nobody anything and invites people to try anyway.
Decide before you leave what actually constitutes an emergency, because deciding while away means deciding every time something arrives. For most service businesses the honest list is short: an active customer whose situation is deteriorating, a payment failure, or something with a legal deadline. Everything else waits, and having written the list is what allows you to leave the phone alone.
Do the preparation that removes decisions rather than the preparation that front loads the work. Automatic replies configured, invoices sent before you go, anything with a deadline in your absence either completed or explicitly deferred with the customer's agreement. Working eighty hours the week before to earn a week off is not a holiday, it is a redistribution.
Turn the notifications off rather than intending not to look, because willpower is a poor mechanism against a device designed to interrupt. Removing the applications for the duration is a legitimate and effective step, and the mild discomfort of the first day passes.
Treat the first attempt as a test and write down what broke. The things that broke are the things still living in one head, and that list is the most honest audit of your dependencies you will ever produce. Each item is something to document, automate, or hand over before the next time.
Then book the next one before you return, because a break taken only when you can afford it is a break that never arrives. Putting a date in the calendar while the value is fresh is what makes this a practice rather than an exception, and the businesses that manage it are the ones that scheduled it in advance.
Tell customers where you are going only if you want to, since a stated absence needs no justification. A message saying you are away until a date is complete, and the instinct to explain frequently produces more questions than it prevents.
Take shorter breaks more often if a long one is genuinely impossible, since a regular day away each month is considerably better than an annual week that never happens. The recovery value of a break is not proportional to its length, and the frequency is what prevents the accumulation.
Watch what you do on the first day back, because the instinct is to work longer to catch up and that undoes the benefit. Almost nothing waiting for you is urgent by the standard of a business that continued without you for a week, and treating the return as a normal day is what makes the next break possible.