Six days in 2023. Four in 2024. Those are the PTO days I earned and never took, and I know the exact numbers because I spent a big chunk of my career in HR telling other people not to do that.
In 2023, my last year at the hospital, I was quietly job hunting and kept a cushion of days "just in case." The cushion just sat there. In 2024, at my new company, I didn't want to be the new project manager who was always out, so I under-booked and then ran out of year. Both times I told myself I'd fix it next year.
From the HR side, here's the part that finally got through to me: in fourteen years, I never once heard unused vacation mentioned in a performance review. Not as a plus, not at all. The only place I ever saw those days show up was a year-end report finance asked about. Nobody gets credit for them.
How I planned 2025
In the first week of January, I did what I'd been telling other people to do for years. I put every day on the calendar before the year could fill up. I get 15 PTO days a year on top of company holidays, and I booked all 15, even when the dates were guesses.
The rules I used:
- Book in January, adjust later. Moving a day that's already on the calendar is easy. Finding a day that isn't there is almost impossible.
- Anchor to Harper's school calendar. Spring break, fall break and Christmas were the first dates in.
- Leave two "nothing" days. No trip, no errands, no plan. These were the ones I was most tempted to cut, so I made them official.
- Check every quarter. On the first Monday of April, July and October, I compared days used to days planned.
- Tell my manager early. Here's what I said in January: "I'm planning to use all my PTO this year. These are my dates. I'll update you if anything moves." The answer was, "I wish more people did this," and that was the whole conversation.
Where the days went
| When | Days | What I did |
|---|---|---|
| Spring break, March | 2 | Home with Harper: the Cook Museum one day, pancakes and a library run the other |
| Friday, May 23 | 1 | A long Memorial Day weekend; Point Mallard opened that Saturday |
| Monday, June 2 | 1 | Our 13th anniversary: lunch out and a 1 p.m. movie |
| Thursday, July 3 | 1 | Drove to Florence for the Fourth at the end of camp grandma |
| Friday, Aug 15 | 1 | Nothing day: a haircut, the back step and a nap I'm not sorry about |
| Monday, Sept 22 | 1 | My 39th birthday |
| Fall break, October | 2 | With Harper: Monte Sano one day, pajamas most of the other |
| Friday, Oct 24 | 1 | Nothing day: a slow walk through Delano Park and an early night before DeSoto |
| Dec 22, 23, 26, 29 and 30 | 5 | Christmas in Florence and the quiet week after |
| Total | 15 | 10 used, 5 approved and on the calendar |
What actually made it work
Booking instead of hoping. That's most of it. A day on the calendar in January has a way of surviving. A day I meant to take "sometime in the fall" never did.
The quarterly check caught the one slip. My first nothing day was supposed to be Friday, August 8, and it got pulled into a schedule deadline. In the old days I would have let it go. This time I moved it exactly one week, to the 15th, and told my manager the same afternoon.
I also started writing a three-line handoff note before every day off: what's in flight, who to call and what can wait until I'm back. It takes ten minutes and means nobody has to text me at the Cook Museum. I've had zero work calls on a PTO day this year. Last year I had several, mostly because I hadn't told anyone what could wait.
The nothing days surprised me most. They felt indulgent on paper. In practice they were the two days I came back from feeling like I'd actually been away, probably because there was nothing to recover from.
Five days left
As of this week, I've used 10 days, and the last 5 are approved and sitting in December. We'll spend Christmas with my parents in Florence and then have a quiet week at home before the new year. Harper has already asked whether "quiet week" means she can sleep until 10. Probably.
I'm not going to pretend using my PTO changed my life. It changed my December, and it changed what I'll do next January, which is open the calendar the first week and do this again.
