What it does: The site helps you get the most out of your vacation by suggesting optimal days to take off around national holidays, maximizing long breaks with minimal vacation days, anywhere in the world and for any calendar year.
It's an idea I've had for a while, and building the algorithm with GPT was a fun challenge. Any feedback or ideas I'm all ears :)
Nowadays, I find that the best time to take PTO is when I feel like taking PTO. Taking a long weekend when I’m feeling burnt out or disengaged goes much further for me than grinding for the entire first half of th year to get a week off for 4th of July. YMMV.
As such, taking off Fridays tends to get me less ROI while Mondays tends to be nice because while everyone deals with problems from the last week head on, I can roll in on a Tuesday with the benefit of their insights and progress. Then there’s the fact even if I’m off on Friday people I socialize with are likely still working anyways so… it could be any day for myself.
Looking at the calendar and seeing the next holiday is 6+ weeks away can really drag you down.
I don't know, seems much easier that if you dont want to work then don't!
I mean the tool OP posted recommended 2 weeks off at the end of March into April on the easter holiday (because of the friday and monday holiday)... who is honestly doing that?
This topic has always rubbed me the wrong way I think because its way too closely tied to the whole workaday / "work sucks" / ratrace / 9-5 mentality.
One other thing as I continue my rant, related, the whole "plan your holidays for the next year so we can figure out the resource planning, even if you move your holiday!" Ugh so depressing, I always am like "welp next year is planned already and its only November". Nothing spontaneous, nothing interesting.
Anyway, I realize also I am likely in the minority here, HN folks will do anything for a "hack".
sad parents tied to school holidays noises.
If your trying to maximize "contiguous days off" and you truly don't care when it is, a tool like this is super helpful.
It's like peak cross country season?! Still loads of snow, but nice weather. I skied in shorts and a tshirt for days this easter!
You know you don't have to do as the tool says? It just highlights one of many variables you can use when deciding when to take your time off. If you have other needs (as your weather thingy, or spontaneity, or when kids are off school), you are of course free to take that into account.
i am absolutely lost in why anyone would do that. And on other side, resource planning is only lame excuse.
But AFAIK most of western europe goes that way.. which is a preliminary planned existance. Boring like hell. Where is Life?
Anyway, OP has a point. I hate traveling on the same day everyone else plans to due to some holiday gap / bridge / whatever.
« In […], there are 11 public holidays in 2024.
Let's stretch your time off from 25 days to 61 days »
61 actually adds up my time off (25) with adjacent week ends and public holidays (27). The 9 missing are week ends already next to public holliday but without any proposed time off extension. If you’re gonna count the WE next to PU it would be fair to include them in the initial count.
The inconsistency is that I didn’t count one Saturday next to a public Holliday in Sunday, while the +9 I’m referring above are Friday/Monday next to week ends.
I know this does not make your product less useful, but in a psychological perspective it toggle my defence mode instantly [0] in the same way an over promising advertisement as the opposite effect than expected.
0: discussion ongoing here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113449
He would count the days of, than all the weekend, then all the hours I am an home across the year (so double counting what he subtracted before) etc, ending with zero days left for school.
This was driving me mad when I was walking to school :)
Making it super customisable would be tough, as then it becomes just a personal calendar. Maybe showing the rankings transparently (3 options tied, choose which one wins) could be nice.
for example, my company has mandatory shutdown days, I have x additional days leave, and z study days leave that I expected to not use more than 1 study day in the same week and I need to use some of my leave by 30 jun as australia businesses manage the financial year as july to june, not jan to december.
Like maybe make the days clickable and give us a popover button for : it'd like this day to be free - and just tread this day as a holiday from there (while deducting the day from the quota)
I was wondering where you got the list of countries from or whether you're using a library for the dropdown?
(Curious because visiting the site from Taiwan it lists it as "Taiwan, Province of China")
I can see there was already much discussion about this topic over on their repo https://github.com/michaelwittig/node-i18n-iso-countries/iss...
- The subtitle telling me I can "stretch [my] time off from 20 days to 42 days" is quite misleading. This tool doesn't magically give me more vacation days.
- Much of the page isn't helpful (in NL there are 6 consecutive months without holidays), would suggest only showing months where "stretching" is possible.
This year it looks like you can achieve the following: In december, take 23rd and 27th off and you get 9 days consecutive time off between 21st and 29th. Add 30th and 31st, and you'll get 12 days consecutive. Add 2nd and 3rd of January and tada, you have 17 days vacation for the price off 6 PTO days! The website linked in this post doesn't get this quite right, as 24th is technically not a public holiday but the vast portion of companies regard it as such.
"Lördag och söndag räknas inte som semesterdagar annat än i fall som avses i 9 § tredje stycket. Med söndag jämställs allmän helgdag samt midsommarafton, julafton och nyårsafton."
If you make a table of holidays and then check on/off those applicable, then have the algorithm fill back in as needed, that would be helpful.
Would recommend being able to adjust the public holidays - for example: Juneteenth and Veterans day off were not days off of school+work.
Other future improvements would be some kind of tie in for airfare - these are typically some of the most expensive times to fly.
Love the idea
So would be better to calculate it like that.
In the state selector, I typed "N" (for New York) and was surprised to see Arizona. After playing around with it, I realize that typeahead isn't working as usual: it's matching any state that has the letter "n" in it.
When can we start talking about things in themselves again? I know its gotta happen eventually, but its been so long, its getting all so boring these days. Like I woke up one day and half the hackers in the world turned into guys talking about different TV manufacturers at Best Buy.
Also there are some holidays missing for Sweden. This is stated in the Swedish Annual Leave Act, which establishes that Midsummer's Eve as well as Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve is to be considered equivalent to a Sunday.
https://www.government.se/contentassets/eaf3467d4f484c9fb727...
Maybe a feature where I'm manually picking some days and it tries to figure out the best way to stretch the remaining nice would be useful.
I also would like the week to start on a monday, btw. Perhaps it could be tied to the country? When choosing norway, calender could shift to how it's displayed here.
It could be longer, but my superiors told me that according to law, I have to take one break that's at least 10 vacation days long and after that I can use the days as I wish.
using 3 days off, you get 7 consecutive days using 4 days off, you get 9 consecutive days
Because sprinkling them to maximize the total number of days isn't really interesting in reality, even though it's an interesting programming challenge. The reason is that I want to have at least maybe 4 out of 6 weeks off consecutively in the summer months, even if that's not maximizing the total number of consecutive days off. It's those remaining 5-10 days I'd like to optimize for particular holidays and so on.
You could also imagine assigning weights to the months. E.g. 1 day off in July is the same value as 10 days off in January (Say you live where the sun doesn't rise without saying you live where the sun doesn't rise)
Also I think there should be per-day manual overrides for force on/off
By the way, I would suggest adding an option: how many consecutive days off does the company allow. And which days are absolutely not allowed to be taken.
10 years ago, in my company (based in Japan), taking a day off on the first day of the week (generally Monday unless there's an holiday) was not allowed due to the general meeting kicking off the week. This changed recently in my company but as this meeting is common in many Japanese companies, some companies might still apply this restriction.
Likewise, taking a day off before or after a holiday was not allowed except for some specific days (typically Golden Week end of April/beginning of May, Obon in August, and the end of year/New Year). This changed a few years ago.
Some suggestions for useful features:
- Ability to customize the work week. I only work Mon-Thurs, which will greatly affect the optimal solution
- Add arbitrary holidays in case the company gives an extra day off, this would nicely complement the existing feature to turn off some holidays
- Select an arbitrary time frame less than a year long. This would be helpful especially to plan end-of-year vacations
- In addition to or instead of the previous point: input what vacations you already have planned. Obviously I can't always take only the most optimal vacations, but I could potentially make my existing ones more optimal by extending them in some cases
Thanks for sharing it! Really cool idea, I've only done this kind of planning ad-hoc in my head, it never occurred to me to solve it exactly
This tool just told me to take all of December off, great time to sit somewhere in the cold.
On 1st January, London gets 8 hours of daylight, Edinburgh 7 hours, Stockholm 6 hours. Tenerife has nearly 11!
There is another layer to holidays optimisation based on stressful days though: eg. I'd rather work on a friday (when tons of people are off anyway, little chance of anyone bothering me with some meetings) than a monday; similarly I'd rather work around Christmas time than any other.
Yes, yes, doing Agile wrong etc
Everywhere I’ve ever worked has treated sprints as an endless series of 2 week deadlines.
(Yes, I understand this is not “real” agile. I’ve never seen “real” agile and don’t personally know anyone who has.)
My experience with agile is either: * you get stressed out being measured at such a low resolution and sandbag or * you wind up in a low accountability context because even management knows how messed up scrum is for their use case.
I wish we had something better.
Holidays here often land on a Thursday. It’s generally agreed to not be worth the effort to get back into work mode for just one day, so everybody takes Friday off too. (Thus, “making the bridge)
This doesn’t count against your vacation time. Even schools take the days off. Holidays seem to be scheduled this way intentionally, and sometimes they’ll even have one on a Wednesday.
If you think it would be fun, maybe you could expose different algorithm choices for how to allocate the blocks?
Eg, I don't necessarily need to maximize the block lengths, but would like the holidays to be more evenly spread through the year. At the moment, it gives me a huge block around the easter period and another one week block later in the same month. And then, there are no holidays for an entire six months from the end of May to the start of November, despite several public holidays in between! I suggest an alternative algorithm would seek fewer one-week blocks and more long-weekend blocks, with some sort of pressure which penalizes blocks for being too close together?
It'd be nice to have different options to maximise my annual leave. For example, if I have 10 days off + 13 public holidays, the website shows all combinations to maximise the number of days off work.
I get (8) holidays each year: New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day.
Two of my company holidays aren’t federal holidays, so being able to toggle arbitrary weekdays as holidays would also be useful.
Also, sometimes holidays fall on the weekend and the observed holiday date is arbitrarily chosen.
Your algorithm did pick the same vacation days as I did this year for December, so it does seem to be working properly in that sense :)
I am in the US, and it says I have 11 days off. If I say I get 0 days off, it says: "Let's stretch your time off from 0 days to 18 days". It looks like it's counting the weekends prior to a holiday no matter what as a "bonus" day, which is a strange methodology to me. (I would expect that it would only count days that it performed some action to optimize, otherwise it's just table stakes)
Adding to the comment on "calculations". Perhaps the wording could be improved, now it feels a bit like a dark pattern in sales.
This is not the best version, but explains what I mean:
"Let's turn your X days of time off into Y days of holidays."
And then obviously it might make sense to "lock in" certain clusters, or ignore them, but in contrast what I wrote above, this would be eye candy.
I could see you incorporating something like that in your site.
Another idea, would be to consider the protected 'wellbeing or sick' days that some states like Illinois have.
Dec 21 to Dec 31: 11 days is actually Dec 21 to Jan 1: 12 days and still only 5 vacation days.
Covers most of the tricks people here (New Zealand) use to stretch out their Holiday lengths.
Sure would be nice to stretch 30 days to 61 as the app suggests...
Other than that, this looks cool. Wish you could turn off public holidays though, some of us don't get those.
My annual leave resets on April 1st, so being able to change the year would be handy.
I worked compressed hours (I have every Friday off)
I can carry over 5 unused days to the next year, and buy 5 more days. This might impact what days I take off.
In NSW Australia, it shows 11 days between Dec 21 and Dec 31, but Jan 1 is a public holiday here and you capsule add Jan2&3 plus the following weekend to get 16 days 21 Dec 2024 through 5 Jan 2025.
Some regional feedback coming from Sweden - your source data set is not 100% in line with what most workers in Sweden will get. For example, 24 December, 31 December and Midsummer's Eve are not reflected as days off in this calendar.
- A lot of companies shut down for the period between Christmas and New Years. That should be a check box.
- There should be user preference for vacation during warm or cold weather seasons.
- Tokyo 30 days to 83 days.
- Hong Kong 30 days to 77 days.
- California 30 days to 76 days.
- France 30 days to 70 days.
It would be lovely to have key ChatGPT prompts available, e.g. in the git history, i.e. how did you get from here to there? and in contrast, what did you do manually?
It demonstrates nicely why I strongly prefer an "unlimited PTO" policy: I never want to have to think about any of this.
Only complain I have is that there is no setting to display Monday as the first day on the calendar display, not Sunday.
UK is missing the August bank holiday btw. And for bank holidays the UK is split in two 3 lists: England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
Following your strategy the Y will be 3 for any PTO day taken, with public holidays total would easily hit 60+ days.
Three day weekends for 14 weeks of May/June/July/August = win.
A quick snippet for console if you really want to break it like me:
for(let i = 0; i < 2024; i++) document.querySelector('body > div:nth-child(1) > main > div:nth-child(2) > p > span:nth-child(4) > button:nth-child(1)').click()
