2 schedule hacks for vacation when you need the clients

I don’t need to explain to you that time away from your business is important. Not having time off can affect your health, makes it harder to maintain community and connections, and it drains your creativity and passion.

One of the ways that our current culture keeps us exhausted is by making “normal” an exhausting schedule, and making us think that we need to work really hard to make things work.

This is doubly-true when we are facing a steady diet of difficult, tragic, terrifying news.

We have to take time off. We have to engage with nourishment and joy and creativity.

Especially in earlier stages of business, it seems like you can easily get caught in a cycle of not being able to take a vacation, because of all the client fees you lose while you’re away.

There are, thankfully, at least two scheduling hacks that can help you get time away. The foundation of both of them is a clear sense of sovereignty over your business.

Sovereignty

For many folks, it’s a big challenge becoming self-employed, running a business, and truly embracing that you really can do anything you want with it.

Resistance partly makes sense; no one wants to do something that is going to sink the business, or slow it down to a dangerous level. It seems safer and easier to copy other people, or listen to experts.

Copying, listening, learning, none of those are bad to do, as long as you keep your mind open, and continue to listen to your own heart and creativity.

Schedule Hack #1: The fifth week.

Although we generally think of months as four weeks, they aren’t really, since most months are more than 28 days. Which means that every so often, you get a fifth week in a month. It may not be a complete fifth week, maybe the 31st is on a Wednesday. But it still means that there are an additional 4 weeks after that week for clients.

To make this work, it requires making sure that you schedule clients either twice per month or four times per month, rather than weekly or every other week.

Then, go through the year, identify the months with a fifth week, and block it off so clients can’t be scheduled on it.

Boom. You can get all of your clients in during the four weeks, receive the normal revenue without interruption, and you’ve got 3–4 weeks of no client time per year.

Schedule Hack #2: Specifying client days.

This is similar in some ways to the first hack, and you do have to be careful to leave yourself enough time to get your clients in.

But, if you have specific days you see clients, let’s say Monday through Thursday, if you block off a Thursday and a following Monday, you end up with five days of no clients in a row.

If you don’t do this more than once per month, it shouldn’t crowd your schedule too much, maybe a day or two might be a little full, but generally you can spread the clients out over the remaining days without too much trouble.

You don’t have to explain what you’re doing.

Because you can feel like you’re “getting away” with something, there can be an urge to say to clients, “I’m going on vacation, so I’m so sorry I can’t be available, I hope it’s okay…”

Yet, think about it. If you are booked with clients on a Thursday, you wouldn’t feel the same sense of apology, you just wouldn’t have any client slots open.

That’s pretty much true all the time. Whether you’re seeing clients, working on the admin of your business, taking a nap, or camping with friends, the client slots aren’t available. A simple, “Oh, I don’t have any openings that day,” works really well.

I have to admit I love the fifth week hack, and when I first figured it out, it really revolutionized my schedule.

And these slots don’t just have to be the typical get-away-from-it-all vacation. It could be a week home with your kids. It could be focused, uninterrupted time for a creative project. It could be volunteering with an organization you love.

Or it could be an actual vacation.

Given the intensity of the world, and the amount of self-care and community care we all need, I want to encourage you to do whatever you need to do to care for yourself.

These schedule hacks often only require minor tweaks to make work, and they can open up your life amazingly well. Take four fifth weeks a year, plus a few more 5 day stretches in other months, and you’ll be feeling so much happier.

Can you do that right now? Take a few minutes, go out a month or two, and start looking for fifth weeks this year? And blocking them out in your calendar?

Then, schedule an hour, maybe in a week or two, to change your client agreements to say “x sessions per month” instead of “weekly or every other week” and communicating the understanding that occasionally, because of the calendar, there will be a two week break between sessions.

With love,

Mark Silver, M.Div. Heart of Business, Inc. Every act of business can be an act of love. www.heartcenteredbusinessbook.com

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