Via Lifehacker, I came across Scott Berkun’s idea of Scolidays. Basically, he’s come up with twelve personal themed holiday days for 2006 with things to try and achieve or think about for each one. Some of them (silly hat day) are a bit random but I really, really like the idea of setting aside time to do things that are important and it’s a nice excuse to have a holiday day in the middle of a bank holiday-free month. I always give up part of my salary to buy five extra days of annual leave each year so I figure that it makes sense for me to designate these as my personal themed holiday days. And, yes, I’m actually planning to book these off work:

• June 23rd – Communication day. Catch up on all my non-urgent letters, write letters to my more technophobic friends and call those I haven’t spoken to in far too long.
• July 24th – Day of insane cooking. Try any kind of weird recipes that I’ve seen on the web and thought looked “interesting”. First on the list is carrot cake and milk soup. OK, that’s not exactly a recipe but it’ll be nice. Probably.
• September 18th – Favour day. A day entirely devoted to helping my friends with stuff they’re doing, be it designing leaflets, shifting gravel, whatever. Get your requests in early!
• October 20th – Day of reflection. What am I doing? Where am I going? Am I happy? What should I do more or less of? All that and more to be pondered on this exciting non-stop rollercoaster of introspection.
• November 24th – Creativity day. The aim: to explore one creative urge and produce something complete by the end of the day, be it a short story, a piece of music or something else entirely.

I’ll see how they go and figure out the 2007 calendar at the end of the year. Maybe a bit sadly, I’m actually very excited by this whole idea!