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When should you take vacation? A strategy

The week between Christmas and New Years, is the worst time to use vacation. The reason is that’s when everyone else will be away. When an office is quiet even the most stressful workplace descends into a calm oasis of interruption-free time. Showing up at work on those days feels like vacation, even though you’ll be paid for it. Of course often family plans demand when you take time off, but if you have a choice you should make it wisely.

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. This is foolish, as here in the U.S. the annual average vacation time 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 alien abductions. Yet somehow more than 1/3rd of Americans don’t use all their vacation each year. Yikes.

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 matinee, 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 presentation for the CEO ?”, “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:

  1. When do you need stress relief the most?
  2. Are you, your friends, or your family, driving the use of your vacation days?
  3. When are other people at work on vacation or away, calming the workplace?
  4. 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?
  5. 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?
  6. 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?