What’s your vacation plan? (Because yes, you need one.)

Business angst at it’s finest.

We need to take vacations to do good work.

Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, attributes novel thoughts to vacations. You need to get away from being in Boss/Creator Mode if you want to keep making things that are of worth.

Yet I’m with Tony Schwartz in that I don’t like unlimited vacation. I’m already not good at taking time off without a little guilt. Make it “unlimited” and the guilt doesn’t end. Everything might collapse while I’m away from my post!

So instead of making my vacation time unlimited (as in “I’ll take time whenever I want”), I went the opposite way. Here’s how I created a formal plan!

Tip #1: I took time to gauge my individual needs.

The older I get, the more I realize that there are certain things about which I don’t care at all.

Back-to-school time? Hooray for department sales, but I don’t have kids. I don’t particularly need excess time.

Easter? I live with Jewish people, so eeeeeeh.

Also: How do people survive taking five weeks off for summer? I would be so bored!

Here are my holidays, according to my vacation plan:

• One week off in mid-July. I like to celebrate my birthday, so why not make it a real occasion?
• Designated week off in late October. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays (so on-brand, I know). But it’s necessary for me to take time and relax after my biggest marketing season of the whole year. Fall is also an uncommon time for travel in my region. If I make time for a trip during this slow times, I’ll save money over the course of the year.
• Week off in December, with an agreement to phase in gentle work the next week. Gotta save myself the “will I get everything done by Christmas” drama. Set that time apart and plan for it.

You may notice that there’s no designated time off during spring and very little in winter. Personally, I don’t like spring much. It’s an expensive time of year and I’d rather save my travel energy for summer. Winter is also a meh time of year for me.

But my boyfriend loves winter and would take six weeks off during December and January if he could. My mechanic friend loves music festivals and jets off during the spring.

This is an uspoken problem (as I see it) with a lot of vacation time: Everyone assumes that people want time off at the same time.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you can adjust your time off to be whenever you want or need it. So why not do it?

Tip #2: I separate work from play (from being sick!).

When I attended the TCC IRL conference in February, I had no vacation plan in place.

Once I came home and started writing one, I had to account for the time I had been gone.

It hadn’t been a vacation. I had been cataloguing quotes, taking notes, running a scavenger hunt and fetching Coke Zeros. It had been a working trip, in addition to one in which I had a lot of fun.

It didn’t feel right to classify that trip as “time off.” So I took some inspiration from friends I knew studying to be teachers and wrote it off as professional leave.

In total, my vacation plan entitles me to 10 days of professional leave per year. This isn’t free time—this is for trips and day long stretches where all I do is learn. It is time specifically set apart for improving my business, even if I’m not making money.

It’s very hard for me to justify taking time off to just learn. I’m frantic about making money. If there isn’t an invoice attached to something, why am I doing it??

But sometimes you need to shut up and learn things from someone else.

Even if I never use all of 10 days, the act of forcing myself to learn on purpose is a victory. Even if I have to bribe myself with time off to do it.

Tip #3: I decided what level of flexibility I wanted.

Now it was time for the trickiest part: What about sick days?

People assume I can (and will) give myself a sick day whenever I need. Entrepreneurial freedom, right?

Nope. I’m an old-school workaholic. I turned in articles at my magazine job early because if I wasn’t working, I’d get bored. I needed to justify any bit of rest I ever gave my body. Even if I was sick.

If I never gave myself sick days, I would never take them.

But I wanted more than 8.5 days a year. Forget that! Even if I never got sick more than once a year, I’d still want more time at my disposal.

Time for emergencies, decompression, special meeting days, or to stand in line waiting for concert tickets if I so desired.

It sounds selfish because it it. But I don’t care. Whenever I’m ready to hire my first virtual assistant, content creator, etc., I want them to have the right to take a day off to stand in line for concert tickets. And I don’t want them to ever think they have to lie about being sick to get that time.

I’ve been in situations where I had to lie about being sick to get necessary time off. Thus to prevent this, I invented the concept of Loose Time.

Under my vacation plan, I have 28 days of Loose Time, 14 of which is mandatory. This may or may not be used as additional sick leave.

Tip #4: I reminded yourself that I need time off (and still do).

My whole reason for wanting to formalize my vacation time was to take myself and my business more seriously.

It’s the same reason why I read books all the time, participate in forums, and collect brochures and catalogs from conferences I’ll never attend.

Vacation still feels like a guilty pleasure. Entrepreneurs are already doing something that lots of people would kill to do.

This often results in bad thoughts like: “Do I deserve to go on vacation? Do I deserve time off?”

Short answer: Yes.

In reality, being an entrepreneur is not easier than a formal job. It’s just choosing a different kind of difficulty.

My normal-job boyfriend sees my ever-sprawling appointment calendar and starts sweating. My normal-job bestie says “that sucks” with sincerity when I tell her about the client I courted for three months that didn’t hire me. Don’t even get me started on the amount of people who pity my bills at tax season.

Yes, I control my own schedule and have the title of CEO. But my success is literally up to me. I have to work hard and be a little paranoid at all times to make sure I have money coming in. That’s the trade-off to this life.

So excuse me, but I’m going to work ahead a little to make sure I’m prepared for my July holiday.