If you’re staring out your home-office window, wondering when you can sign off and enjoy the weather, this blog is for you!

Social media managers and agency owners need breaks, too! While you might LOVE what you do and working in general, the workaholic lifestyle is not sustainable. Burnout is real and can negatively affect not just your personal life and mindset, but also your business and work, too. Taking time off and coming back refreshed is exactly what we all need from time to time!

But what about your clients, accounts, tasks, and team? The last thing we want is to be bugged on our vacation by clients and have a crazy workload to come back to.

Let's go over tips to manage everything while you are OOO:

How to Take Time Off as a Social Media Freelancer:

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Planning Ahead

Map it Out

Think about all the tasks that you do weekly and map out whether they can be done ahead or they can wait for you until you get back. Revamp your schedule the week leading up and after your time off to incorporate these tasks!

Batch Content

Batch create content to cover your time. Make sure it's things that can be scheduled and don't need manual tweaks, posting, and adds⁠.

Schedule It

Use the in-app feature or your favorite scheduling tool (we LOVE Later!) to batch schedule content out while you’re gone!

Boundaries & Expectations

Vacation boundaries are different ✨ Set boundaries for your clients AND yourself. Boundaries will look different for every single person. Do you want/need to be completely off, or do you want to still keep a communication line open for clients and do a few small daily tasks? If you're completely off, snooze your notifications, set your OOO email, and let your audience and clients know you'll be out. If you choose to stay on for limited availability, set a timer for X minutes per day to catch up on questions, DMs, emails, and comments, and manually post items. Then log off and enjoy your vacation time! Remember, whichever boundaries fit best for you, always inform your clients so you don't end up with angry clients when you get back because they felt misinformed.

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Utilize your Systems + Tools

That's exactly what they are there for!⁠ Make sure you are fully utilizing all the processes you put in place and the tools to help you save time! As social media managers and entrepreneurs, the most valuable thing you have is your time, so make sure you are finding effective ways to be more efficient and effective, whether you are out of the office or not. We like to use our CRM tool, Dubsado, connected to Stripe, for automated invoices, auto-pay options, onboarding steps, offboarding steps, and monthly management calls + reports. Plus, our scheduling tool as we mentioned above for the content posting piece of our jobs.

Communication

Yes, we mentioned this above, but here we are again. Communicating your time off is just as important as taking it! Communicate your time off with your clients in advance, and set that OOO with information on when they can expect to hear from you during this time (just in case, because you know at least one client will forget!)⁠

Pro Tips for Taking Time Off as a Social Media Manager:

If you have a team, have a calendar in your project management system where you can add in time off and delegate tasks over that timeframe⁠.
If you're a solopreneur and engagement + manual story posting is in their packages, you can refund/discount their services for the time period to exclude any issues. ⁠

Trust us, the work can wait. Book your trip, rn!