Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?

> I would be perfectly fine even with half money I earn

Wut? Either you're willing to work more hours and receive more money, or you're willing to work less hours and receive less money. They're literally mutually exclusive.

You can't genuinely want both things.

While I know it is that simple to justify, all of us that have been consultants where our money is dependent on our time understand where you are coming from, so you aren't alone in this. Based on your description though it seems like you are scared of your client taking work away, if true, this is a horrible client to have. The best way to solve this issue is to find a new client. I am a little confused though as you also call them a partner company so I am unclear what your relationship is, but either way it sounds unhealthy and you need to change it. Either you need to set new expectations and new boundaries or you need to find a new client and get away from them.

I always set boundaries at the beginning of an engagement, and I would always set the expectation that if a contract was 3 months or longer that a developer would take around 2 weeks of vacation. So even if the dev didn't take time during that contract and did it after or before, the expectation was there so everyone was on the same page. Plus good clients don't want you to burn out because then they lose out on your services too. When you have a client that doesn't respect you and you've allowed them to dominate you it will never end well. You have to set clear boundaries and expectations early on, doing it later is possible but it isn't easy.

Basically, if you don't fix this soon and take a little time, you will fail by burning out which is much harder to overcome at that point, and can take much longer to recover as well. So best to address this now and not wait.

If you’re close to 100% and not burned out, when working, you’ll thrive.

I only learned this 12 years in. I’m on year 16 now.

For me the question is entirely reversed. I have to justify to myself giving up my time for a client or employer. The natural state is for me to fart around, I wasn't put on this planet to commute to a cube.

I do it because it allows me to achieve my goals - things like having fun experiences, donating to charity, helping out family and friends, being a useful human.

If I did it 24/7 then those goals would fade into irrelevance because I'd have no time to pursue any of them.

I had wrote a longer post, but I've edited it, because I think really this is the key take-away. Do you work to live, or live to work?

As the situation stands, you would be happy with less money for less time -- that means that you might be in a position to hire an employee to do some of the work for you.

Sounds like you are being consumed by greed and fear.

> I'm not gonna lose only vacation expenses

By framing spending on recreation as a "loss", you have foreclosed your mind from even thinking about it rationally. Recreation is essential to man's life.

> also similar amount in lost income for every day I would not work.

Again, you are framing the issue in terms of loss. Money you don't make while on vacation is not lost income--it is not a thing you have that you lose. It is merely unearned.

> unpaid vacation

There really is no such thing as "paid vacation". Vacations are never paid for anyone. Some people have "holiday pay" or "PTO" or "vacation hours" or "sick hours", but those are all misnamed--they are earned from working and are factored into total compensation (all benefits are paid for by the employee's wages; greater benefits mean lesser wages).

> As I see it now I will give family vacation, meaning wife and children can enjoy different place (beach) and I will work from hotel room, possibly finding few free hours in early morning or late afternoon and free weekend.

Why do you think you are unworthy of vacation, that it is something to only be given to others? And, in practical terms, your plan will almost certainly lead to resentment and regret between you, your spouse, and your children. You will be thinking of the experience as a loss and sacrifice, your partner will feel lonely (the purpose of vacation is to recreation and rejuvenation of oneself and one's relationships), and you will miss out on shared unusual experiences with your kids.

The first question isn't how to justify a vacation or what kind of vacation to take. The first question is: Why do you want to take a vacation?

There are two very good reasons for it - one is family and the other is my health. No amount of money can replace not being around my wife and child. The other reason is health (both physical and mental). I am of no use to anyone if I am burned out and half crazy. If your current partner company doesn't understand that - GTFO.

Work/life balance is important. We can only go so long before our quality of work begins to suffer, along with our mental health.

Seek out more clients, raise your rates, and sub-contract the more menial/unpleasant parts of what you do, would be the ways I would look at addressing this.

When I contracted, I set my rates and anticipated annual hours to include (1) holidays (2) vacations (3) a bit of sick time (4) un-paid work (like finding new clients). I could always make more by working more, but I didn't want to.

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It's really no different that a salaried job. I could take "vacation" from a salary job to work on a side-gig, but I don't because that would be exhausting.

Budget for money, budget for time off, take the time off.

Normally the typical advice when someone who is self employed has too much work is for them to raise their rates, but this works much better if you have more than one client since that does mean that you still have some clients to fall back on otherwise...

For your specific situation, I'm not sure what to say, apart from advising you to try to get out of this situation by 1) finding other better paying clients and 2) slowly reducing the tasks you do for your current client to the more value added tasks.

When you bill by the hour, it's natural to start thinking of everything in terms of lost time and money. And I actually think it's reasonable to think about the cost of taking time off, but if this is keeping you from taking vacation and spending time with your family, then you are severely undervaluing your time off. You can think of time off as a sort of cost, but it's a very small cost compared to the value it provides.

I don't have experience with working for customers in different cultures and across international borders, so I'm afraid I don't have any insight there. If I was in that situation, I think it would still come down to negotiating the vacation that I need.

I also don't have much experience with juggling several (>2) projects at once. In my experience, people seldom need just a little software engineering. If someone wants some software engineering, they usually want a LOT of it and don't want to compete for your time with other projects. So I tend to work on one project at a time, take vacations, and when the gig comes to an end, I look forward to taking a few months off to study.

So I suppose if I was in your shoes, I would insist on vacation, and not worry too much if I lost a customer that wanted to burn me out. (I acknowledge that working in the software industry puts me in a rather privileged position where I can be picky.)

As far as I'm concerned, the point where making more money doesn't increase your quality of life but reduces it is where it needs to stop and you look well past it. The point of self employment is not having to justify your life style, including vacations.

If I were you I'd look for a different employer or rework my business and split my time between a number of them.

Obviously, you need to discuss this with your employer (I call them 'employer' because they are your only gig and full-time). I doubt they expect you to never take any time off, so it shouldn't come as a surprise and they should respond rationally if you approach it with no immediate deadline. For example: "sometime in the next few months I'd like to schedule some time off and I want to work with you to ensure minimal disruption to the business." If you are willing and it would be helpful to them, you can offer to check email once a day while on vacation for any urgent blocking issues.

You mentioned being worried about competition usurping your work if you take time off. It's unclear if you're doing work where there are instant drop-in identical replacements to you readily available. Since you're wall-to-wall busy with work it seems that your role is important and you mentioned that you'd take less money for less work, so you're pretty well-paid. I guess I don't understand because roles for which there are instant drop-in identical replacements aren't usually high earning. If what you do is so mission-critical that they'll have to replace you with another contractor if you're unavailable for a scheduled-in-advance week, then it's likely you have job-specific knowledge and skills that can't be easily replaced by a new contractor in a week. Which is why they should be willing to work with you to coordinate your vacation and minimize disruption.

There is a hierarchy of ways that you can provide value to a client. I call it the TKPV ladder. Each letter represents what you provide in return for compensation.

T stands for time. At this level, your client pays you by the hour, day, week, or even minute. Your value is measured by the time you put in. This is the lowest rung of the ladder. While you have some control over your allocation of time (as opposed to with an actual job) this is not really much different in principle than working at Walmart or Starbucks. You are a wage slave.

The next step up on the ladder is K, which stands for knowledge. If you can promote your relationship with your clients to this rung, your value becomes the knowledge, experience and ability you bring to the table, which is measured by its value to the company, not by the number of minutes you've slaved at a task.

The next rung on the ladder is P, which stands for product. At this stage, you transition from selling knowledge and talent to selling a specific product or service that wraps up the knowledge and talent that you and your team have acquired into something you can sell to a customer, hopefully without too much customization. And then sell to another customer, and so on. If you reach this stage, you have productized your value in such a way that you can produce and sell it at scale.

The final rung in the ladder is V, for vision. At this level, you take your vision for future products and services to people who are in a position to provide you capital and support to expand and scale your reach to its maximum potential.

In my Consulting business, when I deal with clients, I try to keep this hierarchy, TKPV in mind, with the goal of moving up the ladder at every opportunity.