Taking time off when the business is one person

Three obstacles, and only one of them is real

Self-employed people take less time off than employees, and the reasons given are usually about money. Money is only part of it. There is also the fear that a client will need you and find you unavailable, and the more diffuse worry that stepping away for a fortnight will cause the pipeline to empty.

This is a different question from what happens in an emergency, which is about continuity and arrangements made for something nobody chose. Planned absence is easier in every respect, and it is skipped anyway. The obstacles are largely solvable, and the cost of never solving them is a business that depends on a person who is quietly running out of enthusiasm.

It has to be scheduled forwards

Nobody in a small business ever finds a free fortnight. The diary fills to whatever the available capacity is, and a gap that isn’t defended will be occupied by work within a week of appearing.

The only method that works is putting the dates in the calendar before the work exists, several months ahead, and then quoting around them as though they were already booked. That is not a trick played on clients; it is an accurate description of your availability. A business that treats its own time off as a firm commitment is doing the same thing every larger organisation does automatically.

Tell people early, and be specific

Clients are almost never troubled by a supplier taking a holiday. They are troubled by discovering it at the point they need something. The difference is entirely in the notice, and a few weeks of it removes nearly all of the friction.

Say the dates plainly, say what will happen to anything in progress, and say when you will be reachable again. Vagueness is what causes problems here: a client who thinks you might be checking messages will send something urgent, and a client who has been told clearly that you will not be will plan around it. Contrary to the fear, an unambiguous out-of-office reads as organised rather than unavailable.

What needs covering is usually contact, not work

People imagine that time off requires somebody to do the work in their place, which for most one-person businesses is neither possible nor necessary. What actually needs handling is the smaller thing: enquiries that arrive, questions from live jobs, and anything genuinely time-critical.

Often a clear message stating when you return is sufficient, because most enquiries can wait a fortnight and most clients would rather wait for you. Where the work has genuine emergencies attached, an arrangement with a peer in the same trade — reciprocated, so it costs nothing in money — covers the cases that can’t wait. Deciding in advance which of your clients might actually need something is a ten-minute exercise that removes most of the anxiety.

The money side is arithmetic, not virtue

A fortnight without work is a fortnight without income, and the standing costs of the business continue regardless. That is a real cost and it is a predictable one, which means it belongs in the pricing rather than in a decision made each summer.

The way established businesses handle it is to treat the working year as containing fewer weeks than the calendar does, and to set rates accordingly. Doing that once converts time off from an expense you agonise over into something already paid for. Deposits and staged payments help with the timing, since work billed as it is done leaves less of a hole than work billed entirely at the end.

The week afterwards is part of the holiday

A return that involves two hundred messages, three annoyed clients and a fortnight of compressed work undoes most of the benefit, and the anticipation of it is one of the reasons people do not go.

The fix is to leave the first day or two back unbooked, and to set the return date you tell clients slightly later than the date you actually return. That buys a quiet morning to work through what accumulated, which is the difference between coming back rested and coming back to a crisis you created before leaving.

The week before matters too, and it is the one people plan worst. Trying to clear everything in advance produces a fortnight of compressed work that leaves you more tired than the holiday can repair, which is a strange thing to do to yourself deliberately. Better to move a deadline or two out past the dates than to arrive at the airport having already spent the rest you were going to take.