Keep Track Of And Use Your Vacation Time
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
We Americans are notoriously bad at taking our allotted vacation time at our jobs. I’ve never been a member of that group, however. I have always viewed my days off as part of my compensation package. If my employer offered to give me no strings attached money, of course I would to take it. I view them giving me vacation time the same way. I’m going to take it.
I highly suggest using and keeping track of your vacation time. Back when I had corporate jobs, I had a note in my Outlook system that listed how many vacation days I had allotted for the coming year, how many I’d already taken (I noted dates and destinations/reasons for the vacation day), and how many days I had left to take. Around the end of each year, I would sit down with the VIPs in my family and try to plan when we would all try to take time off for birthdays, trips, holidays, and breaks. I would then request those times off early in the year, so I was more likely to be approved.
Please note, when I worked in small offices where someone would have to be present in order to cover my absence, I made sure that the people covering for me were able to do so and that I wasn’t asking for time off around every major holiday. We had systems in place, especially for the time from Thanksgiving to the New Year, to make sure we had transparency on who was going to be gone and when so that everyone had a fair chance for time off but there was still adequate coverage.
Even if I requested time off during times that weren’t really popular, I still had a checklist of things I needed to do in order to cover all my bases and communicate my absence to all interested parties: request time on the official company time off system, update the team calendar for my local support team, send an evite to family calendars for other family members who were also involved, notify daycare or school if children were involved, update my vacation time note in Outlook, etc. People always knew pretty far in advance when I wasn’t going to be around and could plan around that absence if necessary. I made sure every scrap of work that could be completed ahead of my absence was done and left detailed instructions for any bits of work that would need to be done in my absence.
In my 16 years working in corporate settings, I never left a single vacation day unused, and I was still a valued member in each of my jobs. It is possible to excel in your work and take all of the time that is given to you to step away and take time to relax and rejuvenate. If you regularly leave vacation time on the table, consider the possibility of planning ahead to try and map out when you want to take your time in the following year and request it early. You’re leaving a valuable form of compensation unused if you don’t.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team