Comments
How to take holidays?
I LOVE holidays. I don’t love my business failing because I’m on holiday. This is an interesting point in life.
As you get bigger, I suspect there are people there to back you up and take over, while you are small, your business is kind of dependent on you being there ALL the time. And since I’m not sure IF we want to get too much bigger, I want a solution that doesn’t require size.
I am off to Vietnam in September. I’ve done 1 week trips before. This is looking like 2-3 weeks. I don’t need a full holiday - I’m totally happy to work my way around but worry that some days I wont be completely there and don’t want everything to fall apart at the seams.
I know when you own a small business, you’re meant to grit your teeth and bear it, but holidays got me thinking…
At my age, people start talking about babies. I am a female, so chances are, I’ll be the one doing the pregnancy and birth thing. The current theory among people I trust is that it would be best to start on this plan before 30, for health and lifestyle reasons (I would love it if someone could say this is wrong and in fact you’re as safe having children at 40 as you are at 30, but for now accept this fact).
So sometime in the next 5 years, I’ll be having some big time off. I need to start the planning now in order to ensure my life remains as cool as it is now.
So the next few months will be spent planning how to:
a) Get 2 weeks off on a working holiday this year
b) how to ensure within the next few years this can extend a lot further or my role can be far more flexible
Isn’t that awfully sensible?
April 21st, 2008 at 8:05 pm
You’d be amazed how few people actually think along these lines - not necessarily having babies, but thinking “I’d like to evolve my business to enable me to do X”. The next step is to start exploring how that can be achieved, within the context of your vision for your business (assuming there is one), and in ways that strengthen the business and your market offer.
April 21st, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I reckon it’s fine for the first few years, but you eventually get sick of always putting everything on hold.
“in ways that strengthen the business and your market offer.” That, to me seems not only key to taking time off, but to growing any business - not relying on good old me but be better than relying on good old me :)
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:38 am
Can’t help mentioning that - in terms of the safe/happy children thing - tucked in there between 30 and 40 there are also a bunch of other years - for instance a few that are perhaps ‘as safe’ as 30, like say 31.. you youngsters are so black and white these days.
Also its my personal opinion that planning for children is kind of as foolish an endeavor as planning for love.. you can certainly have theories on how to respond and what you might do when or if it should happen - but in my experience about 80% of folks with kids didn’t really ‘plan for it’ in advance.. and the 20% that did often find that things didn’t work out the same way as they might have thought. So hey cross that bridge, but maybe have a couple of pontoons along ready for the just in case.. still what would i know im only a stinky man.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:40 am
BTW in my book people saying they wanted to get pregnant at the moment they conceived is not at all the same thing as folks ‘planning for kids’ career wise and relationship wise etc etc.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 am
Yeah we are black and white! The thing is though, if you want to have a couple, its gonna take at least 2-3 years which I add in as the ‘extra years’ category…
I’m definitely not planning for babies (eek!), but I do LOVE my lifestyle and need to plan to keep that up whatever the eventuality - babies or holidays or working part time or whatever - Basically I know I’m not gonna want to work this hard forever :)
But yes, I imagine if it WAS babies, the little guys would come when they’re ready and cause unplanned havoc for years :)
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:57 pm
And Miles, from my limited understanding of your situation, you seem to have planned for a fairly cool lifestyle yourself?