I don't live in the U.S. and I have five weeks of paid vacation in a year, but I usually take several weeks of unpaid vacation as well to go with it. My employe

I don't live in the U.S. and I have five weeks of paid vacation in a year, but I usually take several weeks of unpaid vacation as well to go with it. My employer doesn't really care which type it will be, they're more concerned about schedules etc. In fact, after I've got the time of my vacation approved, I'll just mark some days as paid and some days as unpaid and they don't mind. With regard to vacation allocations, I play it safe: if I need anything longer than a week off, I'll request the absence in good time. This works well because a) they can project it into the project schedules and b) if I want six weeks off next fall, they really don't have a practical schedule for next fall yet, so I get implied priority. Oh, and I work part time as well. There was more to that when I started it but basically it boiled down to them saying "we'll rather keep a good guy working less for us than not at all". I get roughly the same amount of work done as before, the shorter days just mean that if I want to take a half a day off and go cycling, that's actually the default mode of operation as nobody expects me to work till 5 or 6pm.