Slacking Issue VII: Vacation

A person that has accrued a fair amount of vacation time may think that they have got all those days they can devote to doing what ever leisure time activity, but certainly not work.  But what a potential 'slacker' may not know is how to effectively use their vacation time.

One of the first tips I have is to find out when your boss/supervisor is taking vacation and most certainly not use any of your vacation days during that time.  At most of my work places, when a boss/supervisor was on vacation that was like a vacation for us as well, so it would be foolish to use a paid vacation day on a day that was essentially a vacation day at work.

In fact, the best time, I think, to take a vacation is on the day your boss/supervisor returns from their vacation.  A lot of times the boss/supervisor may have some "new ideas" or, at the very least, get things "caught back up" since they were gone.  So if you are conveniently gone, you would miss out on any of this activity and return just in time for things to get back to normal.

Another tip, which is just blatantly obvious is to 'piggyback' your vacation time.  That is, to take a day off when you are already getting paid time off to make the paid time off period even longer.  For example, if Christmas falls on a Friday and you get that day off paid, take the Monday off as well and now instead of a 3 day paid break you have a 4 day break, almost an entire work week...plus, you are shortening up 2 work weeks and using only 1 paid day off...common sense is all that is.  The trouble comes when you have one of those holidays that happens in the middle of the week...which really is only the Fourth of July for most of us, which may tend to land on a Wednesday ... then do you take the days off in front of behind it?  If you don't have a lot of vacation the easy answer is to find out when your boss/supervisor is taking time off and make sure you are working those days...I don't know a single Fourth of July holiday that I had to work where I was busy at all, so even having to work around some of these holidays isn't so bad either...depending on what you are doing...