I wish I could take a month off! My manager won't let me, unfortunately: he gets all anxious and irritable after a few days whenever I don't show up at work.
(I'm self-employed.)
(I'm self-employed.)
- start saying no to everyone
- spend about a month winding down existing projects
- enjoy your break, do something you love for a while
- when you get below $X in savings, ask around for work
Basically, there is a one month spin-down period and a one-month spin-up period. You have to have pretty good deal flow (i.e. you are already telling people no most of the time) to try this, and it's still stressful when you start to worry about whether your savings will last. But as long as your work doesn't inherently require you to be on call, you can wind things down and shift responsibilities around. As long as you're considerate of your customer's needs when doing this, they'll be willing to accommodate you. And you can practice this whenever you wind down an existing project in order to switch to a more interesting and/or lucrative one, a skill you ought to be practicing at least a couple of times a year if you're an excellent programmer.
I can only speak to my biz: most of our revenue is service (although we're trying to migrate to product). So we have three primary "departments," if you will: sales, production, service/support. I've chosen to staff out "production" first with kickass developers. But somebody has to take care of sales and service. Service/support, we've automated that pretty efficiently and only bother devs with processed support issues.
Sales, however, still requires the cultivation and management of client relationships. You can't just phone that in, and the way we've grown our business has been via relationship (i.e., referrals and word-of-mouth). So even if I was 100% out of production (which I'm not, yet), there's still the bizdev side.
At least that's how it is now; two years in the future I'll probably have a different answer and perspective. A lot of this stuff you just figure it out as you go; there's not a book out there that tell you how to run your biz.
This is one of the first things you'll notice being in business for yourself. It's hard to arrange time off. One of the benefits of working for a company is that there's a team in place to make sure the train stays on the rails while you're gone.
You also don't get sick days.
The others who were waiting on my emails got a very sincere apology and explanation, and we were all good.
This goes to show that you only think you have to be there all the time.
That's one of the hardest parts of running your own business IMO. I had to have an op, recommended recuperation was 2weeks of bed rest, I was back working the next day; yes there were deleterious effects on my health.
Also, the flexible schedule allows for mini vacations whenever you need it, which helps a lot. It's great to be able to blow off work whenever an opportunity to do something great comes up, as long as you're disciplined about getting things done other times.
I take my computer with me everywhere I go, even on vacation. I've had conference calls in the morning and hit Disney World in the afternoon. Usually my customers don't even realize I'm out and about.
So while you could say that your not really on vacation just remote, you could look at it the other way and realize you could spend a month in Florida on vacation and still make a few bucks in the process. I've been on vacations that have paid for themselves simply by putting a little work in for half a day here and there.
It feels a lot more like vacation than work.
My experience is that you just have to force yourself to stop working. It's terribly easy to let your business tak over your life. Me, I just force myself to forget about everything but the bat-phone on Sundays.