How To Take Time Off

[snowborn77]

These categories don’t make it clear where I should put my questions, so apologies if this should be somewhere else.

Anyway, I haven’t started selling yet; I’m in the research phase, trying to get as familiar with how it all works as I can before I start, and I was wondering if someone can tell me if it’s possible to take time off and not do any gigs for a while. You don’t have to say “Yes” to every order, I assume. You can do as much or as little work as you like, right? Can you just tell the people in your que that you’re taking a vacation, as long as you give them the heads up far enough in advance? Can you just take a day off on a whim?

If you need to know, I’m looking at getting into video and graphics editing, voice-overs, and teaching English.

[Guest offlinehelpers]

You can take a vacation any time you like, but make sure all your gigs are delivered and completed before you go off - users will still be able to message you, and it will count against your response time. So no, once an order is in your queue, you can’t just let them know and go off.

Turning down orders after they’re placed isn’t a good idea, even by mutual cancellation - they will count against you in the long run.

Fiverr’s really what you make of it - if you treat it as a professional job, you should do really well.

[capitalquality]

You can take vacation but once you get started and if you have daily messages and orders, timing becomes key. You need to start declining new queries a few days before you want to go on vacation, so taking a day off on a whim isn’t really feasible. It’s best to use vacation mode when you want a few days, week or month. What you can do is extend your delivery times on your gigs to give you the opportunity to do no work on a day if you choose to. You’ll still have to answer messages.

It’s much better to be ready to do things if you get a day off by ‘accident’, i.e. you don’t have any orders and not many messages. Be ready to do something useful/fun with that day.

To answer your question about saying no and doing as little or much work as you like, then yes, in theory. The reason this only works in theory is that it can be difficult to get your workload to flow in a consistent way. Not everyone who contacts you will order. Not everyone who contacts you will order on the same day, so it’s very difficult to get the balance right.

For example, my ideal would be to work on Fiverr 2 hours a day, Monday to Friday. What I often end up doing is 5 hours a day Friday and Saturday, and nothing on Monday and Tuesday, with Wednesday/Thursday being who-knows-what-will-happen days. To balance some of this, I have longer delivery times, but this means less orders, which also affects the hours I work on which days.