Working From Home And Public Holidays, Managing Your Time Off For Best Effect.

Today is a bank holiday and it is pouring down. Even if it had not been such a bad day I would have been unwilling to make any travel plans. Whilst it is great to take advantage of days off the fact that I work from home makes this almost meaningless. Because I work from home I can plan my holidays much better than many people. The consequence is that I do not need to take a public holiday off if I don’t wish to. Because the biggest part of what I do is computer related, doing Online jobs of one sort or another, I can work extremely effectively whilst the rest of the nation is taking a break.

There are a couple benefits to all of this. First is that I can get stuck in to some duties in the expectation that I am unlikely to be side tracked. The phone is unlikely to ring as work colleagues and clients presume that I am taking the day off. So deep concentration Work from home duties like writing can be undertaken without distraction and I can get as much finished on one public holiday as two average work days. I may even make use of this fact to excuse taking not one but two days off in lieu later on!

Secondly I get to miss the difficulties of public holiday traffic. It seems that wherever you go on a public holiday these days you share the road with the rest of the nation. This is particularly annoying when the weather is fine, it is so frustrating to be stuck in traffic congestion when the sun is out. Which brings me on to the last point. No one seems able to forecast what weather conditions will be like on a public holiday. But, because I work from home I can effectively pick and choose my own personal public holidays at the last minute and make sure that I get a break when the weather is good.