Why You Should Take January 8, 2024 Off.

To make the most of your paid time off this year, I suggest you take January 8th off.

Since Christmas, New Year’s, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day fall on a Monday, if you fly out on January 8, 2024, you’ll give yourself four consecutive Mondays off. That’s a full month of a four-day workweek for the low price of one day of PTO.

Here are some more tips for making the most of your free time this holiday season.

The Jan. 8 tip originally came from lofispaceship on the Reddit subreddit r/lifeprotips . Commenters quickly added other holiday calendar hacks, such as the following:

• Take Most of November with 8 Days of Vacation : If you work a five-day week and get Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and the day after Thanksgiving as a day off, you can take eight days of paid vacation and enjoy the full 17 days. turns off in a row. Takeoff days are November 13–17 and November 20–22. (Although not everyone has Veterans Day off.)
• Plan for a holiday drought : For many workers, the time between MLK Day and Memorial Day amounts to five months of holiday drought with no official holidays, although if you’re lucky, Monday, February 19, 2024, will give you a day off for presidents. The day and/or day before Easter. That’s almost halfway through the year, so keep that in mind when planning how to “spend” your accumulated vacation time.

The most important tip: make sure you actually take time off.

The research on the importance of recharging batteries by taking a little “me time” is clear, and more and more companies are offering “unlimited time off” to entice employees. This is great in theory – who doesn’t want all the free time they need? – but in practice this leads to employees taking fewer days off . The average employee with fixed PTO in the US takes 15 days of vacation per year, compared to 13 days for the average employee with unlimited PTO. This is often because workers don’t want to appear lazy, but it’s actually better for your productivity to take time off, so protect your time off yourself. Remember: unlike fixed holidays, you won’t be reimbursed if you don’t take days off.