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** This post was written by Christine Cantera. Find out more about Christine below **
One of the often overlooked elements of the location independent lifestyle is the national holiday. Normally a time for celebration, they can wreak havoc for a location independent professional…
Firstly, there is your home country – where your friends, family and most likely your bank account reside…
Regular holidays/celebrations, like Mother’s and Father’s Day, are different in every country as well as from year to year. There also are the seemingly random bank holidays – in America for example, there’s Veteran’s Day, Columbus Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. All are considered bank holidays, but not everyone has the time off from work.
If you’re expecting client payments into a US-based account or you’re trying to contact a client on one of these holidays, they’re easy to forget and can be a major hassle.
Then there is the country in which you’re residing now…
You may wake one morning full of vim and vigor, ready to hit the shops – only to exit your house and find your city has turned into a ghost town. Or you may have guests from home visiting you and it turns out that the birth of a saint 650 years ago has made the streets impassable and every restaurant fully booked.
Finally, there are your clients to think of…
Many of us location independent freelancers have clients all over the world. This makes it a task keeping track of when the “end of day” is for them – and it’s also important for you to know when they might not be available. You also need to keep them updated in advance that there’s a national party going on in your corner of the world and you might be unavailable.
And let’s not forget how national holidays can mess up a scouting mission to a new location, your own vacation/sightseeing plans whilst travelling, or in some cases make even the kind of clothes you’ve packed become unsuitable!
Luckily, the same technology that allows us to be location independent professionals also helps us overcome these little challenges. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the tools available, so you’ll never miss a holiday again – no matter where you might find yourself!
- If you’re on a Mac, iCalShare has 2,744 calendars available that sync up automatically with your iCal, including 182 location-specific calendars for everywhere from Argentina to Azerbaijan. This is a great tool if you want to integrate a holiday calendar with your own personal one, without typing them all in.
- Earth Calendar might look like it’s stuck in the ‘90s, but this gives you everything you need at a quick glance including worldwide holidays by date, country, religion and even lunar phases!
- Country Reports shows you major holidays worldwide in a monthly calendar view, which is good for planning. Also featured are the birthdays of prominent and historical artists, inventors and countrymen, hyper-linked to a brief explanation of each. Very interesting.
- Bank Holidays of the World is an invaluable tool, with countless specific searches that lead to extensive drop-down menus and features a world map as well. For example, you can look up the trading holidays for every major stock market in the world; you can also see a full list of tradeshows happening worldwide. There’s even a “Holiday Box” widget you can put on your blog or website. It’s available in 16 different languages, too, which can be good for informing clients or learning the correct names of holidays wherever you are.
And just to round out this information extravaganza, here are some great, quick links to help you figure out what the heck time it is, as well!
- The United States Naval Observatory’s World Time Zone Map is available online and offers has two downloadable, printable formats as well. It might be a bit confusing to read at first, but because it goes country by country, it’s highly accurate. And if you don’t like it, you can give it to the kids to color in!
- Anyone who’s done a Google search for “time” is no stranger to timeanddate.com’s world clock. But are you familiar with their best tool, the time zone converter? Choose the day and time, and then the two cities you’d like to compare. It will give you a straight answer – “At the specified time, local time in Rome was 7 hours behind Denpasar” – as well as the local time and time zone for each of your comparison cities.
- However, the best one of all is crucial to the location independent lifestyle – and is found on the converter results page above. Simply click on the “Find suitable time to call” link, and you’re taken to a color-coded list of the corresponding times of each country. One word: BRILLIANT.
What time and date tools do you like to use to manage time zones and holidays in your location independent business?
I work with clients in mutliple timezones and I find the firefox plugin foxclocks invaluable.
One thing I use a lot is a set of clocks on my Dashboard
If you’re in Japan watch out for the “obon” holiday in August. It’s not an official holiday so not on the lists or calendars but EVERYONE is on the move. Flights quadruple in price, security takes forever as people who never normally travel get confused with what is and isn’t allowed on planes and bullet trains are standing room only.
Just wait one day extra, everyone is back at work and everything is back to normal!
Similar thing with the Golden Week holidays in May, although those are usually recorded on the calendars and lists of bank holidays.
Be genki,
Richard
That is something that travelers ususly don’t take into account. I have been to Dubai during Ramadan, and now Taipei during Chinese New Year. Both places turn into ghost towns. I was not surprised about Dubai, but I was for Chinese New Year. I guess the point is that there is a little research that needs to be done, then again it is also the fun part about traveling to see different cultures.
Good point:) Unforeseen holidays can blow a project.A helpful thing when specifying timelines for a project for a client in a country I do not know well is to give timelines in working days and adding a note ‘The above timelines indicate working days and are exclusive of any national/religious holidays’.Saved me a couple of times. Cheers
I use Fox Clocks as well. It’s fantastic- just look in my browser to see what time it is in the US. Really great right now when the US is on DST and the UK isn’t yet!
Excellent post! We have been on the move since 2006 so run into this all the time.
Different countries do DST at different times too, so that has thrown us a few times. Even though we know, we goof sometimes, like this week we got my daughter’s piano lesson in Spain with teacher in Chicago messed up.
Luckily, most of our things, do not have strict timing, but it is something important to consider any way.
We actually got rear ended while waiting in traffic in France on the biggest holiday of their year last summer, on our way to the sea where we were to catch a ferry to Ireland.
Had we not zoned out on the holiday ( we knew at one point but didn’t realize how it would impact us), we would have made sure we were not in Friday night traffic on the biggest summer week end of the year, headed to the sea!
It is a fun art dodging holidays around the world! lol!
My wife and I ran into this three times this month! Daylight savings hit us twice, once when it changed at home and we weren’t sure if we should adjust our clocks here; again when it changed and we didn’t know it, so we missed a meeting! We also called our mothers to wish them a “Happy Mother’s Day!” which confused them, as at home there’s another month and a half to go! :D