3 ways to stretch your limited PTO and travel more

When it comes to travel, Americans have a few advantages, from the strength of our currency to our passports.

That is, except when it comes to time off.

While most of the world would clutch their pearls at Americans maaaybe receiving a measly two weeks of paid vacation a year, that’s standard for us. So let’s work with it. Here are three tips to hopefully help you stretch your paid time off, or PTO, so you can take that much needed getaway.

Tip 1: Advocate for more PTO

If you’re working in the private sector, chances are your PTO policy hasn’t changed in a while. Now could be the time to change that. Along with asking for additional floating holidays throughout the year, it’s also worth asking for quarterly wellness days. That way if you not-so-accidentally use all of your PTO in the first month of the year, you won’t be chained to your desk the rest of the year.

If your job is remote-work capable, having additional WFH days on birthdays and award show nights does wonders for morale. If you can't work from home, then throw in a couple additional days off. The more paid time off you have, the harder you work when you’re clocked in - it’s science. Basically.

Tip 2: Rearrange your schedule

The biggest change you can make to having more paid time off is to naturally extend your weekend. Allow me to introduce you to the compressed work week. If you are able to rearrange your work week to four ten hour days, the trade-off is an automatic three day weekend every week. If you want to get real wild with it, you can do alternating three and four day work weeks with twelve hour shifts.

As long as you get your work done.

On that note, champion for adding more half days on Friday since…everyone mentally clocks out at 3pm anyway.

Tip 3: Become a weekend warrior

The biggest tip for really stretching your PTO is fully utilizing built in long weekends to your advantage. Long weekends can be great for domestic or short international trips. Plus, you can easily turn a holiday weekend into a longer trip by only using one or two more days of PTO. A few holidays to keep your eye on when planning for travel are:

• Martin Luther King’s Birthday - (3rd Monday in January)

• Memorial Day - (last Monday in May)

• Labor Day - (1st Monday in September)

• Indigenous Peoples Day - (2nd Monday in October)

• Holiday breaks - (last week of December into first week of January)

What does your PTO status look like? Do you use any of these tips to stretch it just thaaat much more? Let me know what works for your job!