It’s mid-January, the month which features Blue Monday, aka the most depressing day of the year. While the concept of Blue Monday itself was a marketing trick dreamed up in 2005 by UK travel firm Sky Travel, as a way of getting people to book vacations in a fallow period of the year, the idea has now been adopted wholesale across the workforce, in a case of life imitating art.
Even though there’s little to no scientific basis that the third Monday of January is the year’s most gloomy day, workers everywhere empathize.
That may be thanks to Sky Travel’s “formula” which includes factors such as weather conditions, debt level, the time since Christmas, time since new year’s resolutions have been broken, low motivation levels, and the feeling of a need to take action.
People everywhere feel the blues in January––think post-holiday debt, low winter light, plunging temperatures, and an empty bank account. Little wonder then that January is also the most popular time of year to start looking for a new job.
What’s my motivation?
Money is almost always the biggest motivator for a job switch but post-pandemic, Americans want a better work-life balance and more job flexibility too.
That includes vacation days. With one in five private-sector workers in the U.S. receiving no PTO, according to the
However, most employers do offer paid vacation time, on average around ten days PTO annually, and according to the BLS, if your tenure at your company is five years, you’ll likely get 15 paid days of vacation.
It’s still not a lot, especially when you compare it to other countries. Depending on the Canadian province you live in, you can get between 10 and 20 days of PTO, as well as seven to 13 paid public holidays.
In the UK, employees are entitled to 28 total working days, and in Australia you are entitled to a minimum of four weeks of paid leave every year.
Maximize your PTO
So how can U.S. workers maximize their PTO and make it work hard for them? There’s a simple trick you can use to stretch out your vacation days by taking the majority of them around public holidays.
With May 27th’s Memorial Day the next public holiday, make sure you put in a leave request for May 24th now. That will give you four days off, by only taking one PTO day.
Or if you want more bang for your holiday buck, consider taking a few extra days around Independence Day. If you take off July 1-3rd and also July 5th, you can get a nine-day stretch for just four PTO days.
Make a job move
Recent research from
As a result, many workers, emboldened by the shift in work thanks to the pandemic, want to move to companies where taking a break is seen as a positive. If that’s you, then the
There are thousands of open roles across companies with flexible work policies or unlimited leave benefits, or take a shortcut and discover three hot tech jobs below.
AI Engineer, Cohere, San Francisco
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Oracle is seeking an experienced
- By Kirstie McDermott