The Amazing Benefits of a Random Day Off
For the vast majority of my early working life I was a school teacher with those ‘long holidays’ (vacations if you’re reading in the US). And gosh I needed those prolonged periods of time away from the classroom. To recover. To sleep. To research. And to prepare for the next term.
But ten years ago when I stepped away from the education sector I suddenly realised that I didn’t need to use time off for those things as they no longer existed. Well, I still needed to sleep but I was no longer exhausted.
The first couple of years I struggled to use my annual leave allocation. I was enjoying my work and if I didn’t have a specific reason for needing time off then I just forgot to take it. I don’t mean I was a workaholic; I generally kept pretty sensible working hours and almost never had to work at the weekend so I was getting plenty of down time.
So to use up my allocated leave days I started taking a day off in the middle of the week every week or so over the summer months when there was lots of daylight and often the weather wasn’t too bad (for the UK at least). I really enjoyed using these days to go on spontaneous excursions, get a few jobs done around the house, or (more often that not) spend most of the time in the garden lost in a good book.
Then we got to 2020. The year where there really wasn’t much to do outside of your own four walls. I continued my random days off in a fairly similar way and it was certainly a wonderful way to spend the beautiful summer we were treated to here in southern England.
Something to look forward to
But at the start of 2021, as we were stuck in yet another lock down, I decided that what was really important was to have something to look forward to. So in early January I decided to book that last Friday of the month as a day’s leave. I had nothing planned, I just wanted a change to the normal routine to focus on throughout the month.
And as those cold, grey January days crept past, I was so glad to have that day off to look forward to. The penultimate week of January I was clinging on to it by my finger nails and using it to get through each day. Then, surprisingly, in the days leading up to that Friday I’d almost forgotten it was coming.
The excitement of finishing work on the Thursday evening and having my usual Friday night ritual (heat at home curry from my favourite restaurant, a cold glass or two of white wine and a couple of episodes of whatever I was watching at the time) a day early was the most wonderful feeling.
Momentum to cope with the darkness
I have no recollection of how I spent that first day off, or the subsequent ones I’ve had since. But I know I enjoyed every moment. So much so that I think it is a tradition I will continue in the darker months of the year even when life isn’t quite as limited as it currently is. I do struggle with the shorter days so having those random days to look forward will hopefully give me a bit more momentum to cope with the darkness.
If you have flexibility in your leave then I really recommend working out where a random day off may help you get through the times that you find more difficult.
