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If your habits aren’t the problem, it’s time to look at what else may be stopping you from stepping back. Are you afraid your business will fall apart without you to guide it? If so, invest more time training your team before your vacation is imminent. Work with your staff to set up quality control procedures, step-by-step protocols, and give them time to work those while you’re still available for questions and guidance (ideally, well before you leave).

Are you afraid that your business won’t make any money without you to deliver services? If you are the sole service provider on your staff, make arrangements with your clients ahead of time. Set up procedures for how your team should manage client needs while you’re away. Give them solid examples of when it’s okay to call you and how to handle anything that isn’t critical or time-sensitive while you’re away. You can also look into ways to automate some of your income. If your business is entirely service-based, gather your knowledge into an ebook, white paper, or video training that can be offered at a low-cost, in a contest, or as a giveaway. You create the content, make a plan, and let your team implement it. (Again, preparation is key; if you can let them run a similar campaign while you’re there, all the better.) This way, new prospects are filling your pipeline while you’re on vacation, so you can actually enjoy yourself!

FACT: If you have the right team and systems in place, your business will survive a week or two without you.

Now that you understand what may have held you back from taking that realvacation, and have gotten some basic strategies to deal with those problems, I want to give you my favorite secret to make sure you get some fun in this upcoming year.

Plan your vacations in advance.

When you plan the upcoming year (or years, as I tend to do), make a calendar of all your important events, including vacations you want to take. You can use gCal, iCal, Outlook, or even a big printed year-in-view calendar if you prefer, but I like to have it both immediately accessible and easily put away, so I plan the entire year in an excel spreadsheet. (This isn’t for appointments; it’s simply for planning.) I use each column to represent 1 month, and each cell to represent 1 day, so when you read across you can see January through December and when you read down you see days 1-31 (or 30, 28, etc.) for each month. I also use colors to fill the cells so I can see (at a glance) what types of events are missing or clustered too close together (for example, holidays are gray, workshops/events are green, teleseminars/webinars are blue, etc.). Remember, you’re just planning here, so don’t go overboard: 1 event per day is enough.

Once you’ve created your planning structure, here’s what you do:

1. Fill in all the holidays and vacations you already have scheduled.
2. If you have marketing or business events planned, put them in.
3. Insert any vacations you want to take, keeping in mind the pre- or post-event workload for anything already in your calendar.
4. Plan the rest of your year (marketing campaigns, events, sales, programs, etc.).

If you have regularly recurring events (such as workshops, sales, or email marketing campaigns) you can space them out proactively instead of reacting to your cash flow. This helps you account for months that tend to be slow as well as your busy season(s). If you know business is frantic every June, obviously you won’t plan your vacation then, but maybe by planning next year in advance, you’ll get to enjoy that trip to the beach in July, as opposed to realizing at the end of August that you haven’t done anything fun yet this year.