You don’t get paid holidays. You don’t take long weekends. You work on Labor Day. Either your boss is a real jerk…or it’s you. Scheduling your vacation time is important.
Want to take the day off? When you’re self employed, it’s not as easy as picking up the phone and saying you won’t be in to work that day. If you get sick, if you put it off, if you don’t get the work done, there’s no one that’s going to cover for you. But this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to work every single holiday, either.
Vacation Time
When you work for yourself, you’re not going to get extra acclaim or bonuses for working on holidays. There is no time and a half, no stockpile of personal days, no one to help you pick up any holiday slack. There is only you, and that means you have to learn the best way to go about scheduling your own vacation time. If you don’t make it work for yourself, then all you’re going to be doing during the holiday season…is working.
Taking the Day Off
Do you have daily commitments? A regular weekly workload? No one knows how to tweak that time table quite like you, so get to it if you want to enjoy holidays this season. Being organized is the best way to go about this. Make a list of all the projects you need to complete for each day, then do an assessment. What can you get done right now, today, so you might enjoy yourself a bit more tomorrow?
If you end up having to take a little time to get some work done during a holiday, that’s just part of the price of self employment. But with a little creativity and some extra hard work, you should be able to enjoy both a paycheck and a little holiday time, too.
