When should you take vacation? A strategy
January 3rd, 2007
I remember when I first entered the full time working world, I was clueless about how to best use vacation, and I followed the herd like the good young sheep I was. Here in the U.S. the annual average is a measly 13 days (Compared to Italy’s 42 and France’s 37): a pittance if you include time-off needed for weddings, complicated mid-week errands, parole violations and the odd humdinger of a hangover. Yet somehow more than 1/3rd of Americans don’t use all their vacation each year. Yikes.
Over the years, like a blackjack player timing his double-downs, I learned which vacation days earned the most bang for the buck, and which were stinkers: it’s not rocket science, but hey, I cherish all the nuggets I know. And now that I’m self-employed all that knowledge is going to waste, so here it is.
In a nutshell: The week between Christmas and New Years, is the worst time to use vacation. It’s when everyone else is on holiday, turning even the most stressful workplaces into calm zones of highly indepenent and low interruption work time. Spending your vacation dollars to avoid a paid vacation in the office, is the worst bet in the vacation world: sometimes it’s a forced bet, as family plans force your hand, but it’s still a lousy value.
The ideal time to use vacation is when there is peak value, in your own psychology, for escape (say when you feel creative burnout). This rarely coincides with what everyone else is doing (or in the above case, is the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing), as weekend trips with friends or sports team schedules put heavy emphasis on using Fridays and Mondays, regardless of when it is you need relief.
For awhile I found choosing periodic Wednesdays or Thursdays, every few months, was the best possible value for a spare vacation day: like a happy hour martini, they provided a dose of relief at the peak of a stress, and neatly divide up the working life into more manageable pieces. Catching a matinée, having a late breakfast and wandering my favorite bookstore, going for a short hike, or shopping in the calm of a mid-week crowd, were all low key, super mellow, high value vacation days.
Taken to an extreme, this strategy falls apart: it’d be a mistake to take vacation only at stressful events, or to dodge your responsibilities (”Hey boss, are you ready to present at tomorrow’s BillG review?”, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m off tomorrow: it’s all yours”). The goal isn’t to avoid hard work, it’s to maximize the value of time off so you’re of most use when you are actually there.
Consider these factors:
- When do you need stress relief the most?
- Are you, your friends, or your family, driving the use of your vacation days?
- When are other people at work on vacation or away, calming the workplace?
- Can you offset your own schedule, arriving at work before/after your coworkers, to make each morning a semi-vacation, free of interruptions or high stress?
- Can you make part of your daily schedule include time at the gym, the bar, the coffeeshop, or with friends, breaking up every day with some kind of psychological reprieve?
- If work is really so unpleasant that you don’t have enough vacation to survive, perhaps it’s not the vacation that’s the problem, but the job itself.
So what tips and tricks for maximizing vacation days do you know?
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I’ve found the most effective technique is to schedule 2/3 of my vacation at the beginning of the year, even if I don’t have any destination planned. That way even if I don’t have money (or time to plan) for a vacation, I at least have the break I need.
I think a lot of people end up taking the end of the year off simply because they haven’t planned well to use it up during other months.
Scott - agree with your comments about the working between Xmas and New Year: I’ve only ever taken that off when I’ve absolutely had to!
In Australia, we generally get 4 weeks vacation. I usually keep a 15 - 20 day buffer, have at least on 2-3 week vacation per year when we travel, and usually try and work a few long weekends by having a Monday and/or Friday off.
Of course, the fact that I have a buffer indicates that I haven’t always taken my four weeks vacation in the year!
Back at Microsoft most of my managers didn’t care about reporting vacation: as long as I was getting things done, that sort of book-keeping was irrelevant.
Same went for hours: I came and went without a thought, but it worked both ways. All the weekends and late nights balanced out the half-days, the arriving lates, and the leaving earlies. What mattered was my performance, not the hours, and it’s the right philosophy.
Scott, you’re right about vacation at Xmas time.
My family used to go to holidays in May or September. Our usual destination was seaside and those times of year are still fine for water activities (in Croatia, where I live). And much more quiet, without summer traffic jams, crowded beaches and so on, what is important for both my wife and me.
But now, when our daughter goes to school we have to spend our vacation in the summer (at least 3 weeks out of 6) and we plan it at the beginning of the year.
The rest we spend without any planning.
As a home educator and father of two under tens, we get to game family vacations a lot easier than most. The best so far was last year, for my mum’s 60th, we organized a mass family holiday to Eurodisney (sorry, “Disneyland Paris”, could that BE any more annoying?) in the second week of january…
Cons:
some parts of park “shut for maintenance” (no, shut so as they can cut staff bills during low season…)
Sometimes, park so empty it feels like you’re in weirdzo post apocalyptic disney zone
Pro’s:
NO WAITING FOR ANYTHING!
most rides have the option to go round again immediately in low season…
Great personal attention from real life happy unstressed and not faking it french folks; when you’re english, you’re brought up to belive if such creatures exist, they sure as hell won’t be working in EuroDisney, where sincerity is only a hypocrisy away…
As cheap as a disney residential holiday can get.
****
But as for general strategy “When every other sucker is working” is a really good one, unless you absolutely, positively have to catch an event that’s on at a “peak vacation” time to get peak crowds.
Greetings Scott!
I tend to agree with Brian above, if you schedule most of your vacation in the first half or first 3/4 of the year, you’ll be less likely to waste your vacation during the holiday slowdown (which I consider between Thanksgiving and New Year’s in the US).
The other thing to keep in mind is that all time away from work is not created equal. Personal time, floating holidays, and the like are rarely transferrable from year to year, and are not paid out if you leave as vacation time often is. So there’s value in using vacation as the last of all your days off.
One more blurb, Bren over at Slacker Manager (great blog) is a proponent of the Mental Health Day, or using a sick day to decompress, and often keep yourself from getting sick. He goes into detail here: (http://slackermanager.com/2004/11/mental_health_d.html). I’m not sure where I stand on that, I normally have enough vacation to use as Mental Health Days, and I would imagine if my manager weren’t as kewl as she is, she would probably frown upon an unexpected vacation day, where a sick day almost goes without question these days.
Scott, that’s definitely the way to have it. I’ve had positions like that in the past, and that’s definitely the way to do it. That kind of flexibility would allow for far more in the way of worker accountablity as well. If Worker X is taking of early, but getting everything done, who cares. But if worked Y is also taking of early but not getting their work done, then you know who to put the blame on.
I’m also a home educator, and vacation scheduling was one of the draws of choosing it. We liked going to Florida the second week of January last year. It wasn’t too hot; it was plenty warm enough to swim; everywhere we went people were friendly and had a little time to answer the kids’ questions. Had we gone during the rush of summer or Christmas, it would have been stressful and rushed.
We also like going places for fall color, but during the week, when most other people are working or their kids are in school. And we also like some more northerly vacations done during May or September, the week after rates drop, so it’s just as warm/hot and places are still set up for the peak season, but the rates aren’t.
We both work for ourselves from home; but when one or other of us worked for someone else, we still tried to schedule things this way. At least we never had to worry about a school district’s schedule on top of our own work schedules.
It’s essential to do things you like to do during vacations. E.g. I like from time to time a lazy day without going anywhere, besides the kitchen probably. However my wife prefer much active vacations and don’t recharge her batteries that way (we need to search some compromises here).
If you can take longer vacations. Possibly a couple of weeks or even more. I know that few have comfort to do that, but the longer you’re off the further you’re from everyday work issues.
If you can don’t check your e-mails and switch off your mobile. When you’re of try to be actually off. Don’t try to work remotely if it’s not absolutely necessary.
And one general advice, but especially important when talking about vacations: don’t care about things which you can’t change.
Spring.
Autumn.
Umm, with all due respect, I think we’d all be better off taking our vacation when things are quiet at Christmas. That way we don’t come back to an overflowing Inbox and urgent problems that are waiting.
If we want our work to flow, we should work at the pace of the people and business around us.
Much stress is induced by the difference between demands on your time and your available time. It’s made even worse with work-ahead/vacation/catch-up, work-ahead/vacation/catch-up, and so on.
Hey Fam: no doubt, it’s whatever works for you. This whole question depends heavily on:
A) What kind of work you do
B) When you do your best work
What flow means varies a ton from job to job, and person to person. I always found the X-mas to New Years week super productive, since as a manager it gave me solid blocks of uninterrupted time so rare during regular working conditions.
I also think the vacation/catch-up cycle is a separate problem: there’s all kinds of tricks to making that transitions easier, but it has little to do with when you take vacation (it’s always an issue).
I’m with those who read Scott’s original post and thought “that’s a mental health day, not a vacation.”
I’m sure there are lots of personal differences in what it takes to re-create oneself. But I wanted to speak up in favor of the long vacation as something essential. I recall someone telling me that it takes at least 10 days to really leave work behind - that on only a week’s vacation some/many/most people are still spending significant time thinking about work - getting in to it or getting out. For me, I’ve felt this has generally been born out. I don’t find vacations of less than a week very restorative.
Further to Scott’s comment about MS’s being very flex in their time accounting, there’s been a recent splash in the media about BestBuy’s flex time program that is formally enshrining this policy. One effect their noticing is that people are actually working more hours. Which in some ways defeats the value for the work, I think.
At my company, vacation and sick time have been merged into “personal time”, another phenomenon that will lead to people hoarding “vacation” time for when they get really sick and skewing US numbers relative to Europe.
I think one thing that makes it hard to take vacation in the technology industry at least is that we’re generally addicted to poor planning, crises, and individual heroics. I have a friend who wants to schedule her family’s vacation, but she’s afraid to because there’s a software launch purported to be at the beginning of the summer that she has to support. So she doesn’t feel like she can make plans ’cause who knows when that launch is actually going to take place.
Don: It’s a good point about the whole sick days vs. vacation days thing. In my limited experience I don’t really care: If I’m the boss, be home when you need to be home and at work when you need to be at work. As long as we agree on how what you’re supposed to finish and when, and you do it well, I couldn’t care less about the rest.
But of course this gets complicated in support roles, or retail work, etc. So I admit there are zillions of special cases.
And I do agree about long vacations. The policy missing I think is the unpaid sabbatical - Give me the option to go away for 3 months every few years without pay. Or perhaps a smaller option: I can get an extra 2 weeks of unpaid every 2 years. Something. I’ve never heard a good explanation from an HR person as to why these more creative options of what vacation is are so hard to create.
But as far as your friend: it’s her manager’s job to protect her work/life boundaries. If she’s going on vacation or having a baby, the working world will survive without her. Postponing family life because a project might slip seems like a misguided set of priorities to me. If she’s afraid that she’ll be asked to cancel her vacation when it does slip, that’s something else - but it’s back to the manager to do his/her job and manage.
I also enjoy the quiet days around Christmas as working days. That’s a good time to get some work done and it saves your vacation days for times when you need some “decompression”.
This year, I decided to start to work 36 hours instead of 40. That amounts to a long weekend (mini-holiday) every second week. I must say, that makes a big difference on stress levels.
I do a LOT of travelling and I find that anytime between April and June are the very best times to travel. what a child learns on vacations if you are going somewhere other than Disneyland, (which is hardly a vacation), they will learn more on that vacation than they will in a classroom. Hands-on learning is always more memorable than book-leaning. In fact the hands-on learning is far better because it enhances the “book-learning”. also, if you don’t have children therea re not as many people on vacation during this time, (unless you you opt for the “un”vacation at Disneyland), so you get better airfaires, hotel rooms and less chaos. the streets are less crowded and people are more willing to interact with you, (should you desire this feature). I never take a vacation during peak season.I just came back from the East coast. I live in L.A. and my airfare, (including taxes and tarrifs, all - inclusive) from LAX to Boston, round trip,was $201.00. But I went from the 16th of April to the 10th of May. I had a marvelous time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s really difficult to say how to handle holidays the right way.
I totally agree with Scott and take my holidays anytime, but not between xmas and new year, but I also think that Fam is right. Everytime I take off a week or two in spring or autumn, I am already afraid of thousands of emails waiting for me when I am back. So, it’s not really a holiday in that case.
But, and that’s for me the most important point, if you can take holidays for 2 or 3 weeks, than do it. That’s the time where you really can relax and forget all emails and jobs.