Unlimited PTO is actually great
Welcome to 2023! I hope you had a good holiday. More importantly, I hope you took some time off to relax, recharge, and spend time with people you care about.
Speaking of time off, let’s talk about PTO, specifically unlimited PTO.
More and more companies are offering it, and people have varying opinions about it. Some love it, and others will claim it’s not what it’s cracked up to be, going as far as calling it a scam because it’s not actually “unlimited.”
The latter is technically true, and it’s why a lot of companies are rebranding it as “flexible PTO” or an “open vacation policy.” “Unlimited” implies that you’re free to take as much PTO as you want, when in reality your company would probably ask questions if you wanted to take five months off every year.
Unlimited PTO isn’t inherently bad, nor is it perfect. Like many things, it all depends on the company you work for. Some companies do unlimited PTO right, and some don’t. Does your company encourage you to take time off and rarely deny requests? If so, an unlimited PTO policy can be pretty awesome! If not, then unlimited PTO is effectively useless.
If you’re job hunting, you need to ask the right questions and read between the lines during your interviews to get a feel for how your prospective employer handles time off. If they list unlimited PTO as one of their benefits (or some facsimile of it), ask the recruiter how it works (and play dumb, if you want, to get a full explanation from them). They’ll almost always tell you how many weeks the average employee takes off. (If not, ask them!) Usually it’s a range, like 3-5 weeks. You can use that as your gauge to know how much time you can take off without raising eyebrows.
Personally, I prefer unlimited PTO over accrued or allotted PTO. It’s a nice way to not have to keep track of how many vacation days I have left—if I want to take some time off within the next couple months, I don’t need to look to see how much PTO I can take and potentially make some compromises. Instead, I can just take whatever time off I need.
The biggest downside is you don't get a payout of unused PTO when you leave the company, but depending on state laws, some companies don’t even pay it out in the first place. Either way, the flexibility of unlimited PTO is worth it for me. But again, it’s only worth it because my company encourages taking time off, and my manager rarely denies PTO requests. And honestly, that’s more important than whatever PTO policy the company has.
Overtime
Other work-related stuff I want to talk about without dedicating an entire newsletter to it.
I don't know if I've mentioned Keyboard Maestro on here before, but you'll probably hear me talk a lot about it in the future. It's an automation tool for Mac that's only limited by your imagination. My latest macro is a small one, but super convenient: With the press of a single key, the tool navigates through Slack menus to change my Slack status, and it's designed to be used with literally any emoji and status message I want. Pretty neat!
Happy Hour
Fun things I’m doing, TV shows and movies I’m watching, games I’m playing, music I’m listening to, and other neat stuff I want to share.
We had a great holiday break and spent some quality time with friends on the Oregon coast. The weather was complete shit, and the power went out twice, but we improvised and had a fantastic time!
We've been making our way through What We Do in the Shadows, and it's one of our new favorite shows. It has some hilarious actors, like Mark Proksch (Nate from The Office) and Matt Berry (from The IT Crowd) to name a couple. The show is Yet Another Mockumentary™, but it's such a unique take on the genre.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in two weeks. In the meantime, catch up on some older newsletter issues if you’re a new subscriber, and feel free to follow me on Instagram for my off-hours shenanigans.
Also, let me know if there are topics you want to read about or questions you have—I'm all ears! And if you think a friend or family member would enjoy this newsletter, feel free to forward this email and tell them to subscribe!