Public Holidays You Have Never Heard Of

Why they are invisible

A holiday you do not observe does not appear anywhere in your working life. It is not in your calendar. Your colleagues have not heard of it. Your project tool does not know about it. Nothing on your screen changes on the day.

What happens instead is silence, and silence is indistinguishable from being ignored. The first reaction is usually to chase, which also arrives on a holiday, and the second is to escalate, which reaches somebody who is also not there.

By the time the explanation arrives — often cheerfully, two or three days later — a commitment has usually been made to somebody downstream on the assumption that the answer was coming.

The three kinds that cause trouble

They are not all the same shape, and the handling differs.

Fixed national holidays. The easiest. They sit on the same date every year and can be looked up once, a year at a time. Christmas, Independence Day, National Day.

Moving holidays. Harder. Lunar New Year, Eid, Easter and Diwali move, sometimes by a fortnight, and the exact dates are often confirmed only weeks beforehand. The useful discipline is to look at the approximate window a quarter ahead and confirm the exact dates when they become available.

Regional and sectoral closures. Hardest, because they are not on national lists at all. A state holiday observed in one Indian state and not the next. A plant shutdown for the first fortnight of August. A bank clearing calendar. The audit week when the finance team is unreachable. None of these appear on any list you can subscribe to, and all of them have to be asked about.

The closure that is not a holiday at all

Worth separating out, because it does the most damage and is the least discoverable.

Lunar New Year is not a day. In much of manufacturing it is a fortnight in which nothing is produced and a further week either side in which very little is, because staff travel and some do not return. A supplier who says they are closed for a week is often describing the office rather than the floor.

A European August works the same way in reverse, and is just as puzzling from outside.

What to do, in order

1. Before quoting any window that crosses a border, look up that country's holidays for the period. It takes two minutes.
2. For a counterparty you will use repeatedly, ask them directly for their closures for the year. They will usually send a list.
3. Put the closures that affect live work in whatever calendar the person making promises actually looks at.
4. For moving holidays, note the approximate window early and confirm the dates a fortnight ahead.

Of those four the third is routinely left out, and it is the step that turns what somebody has looked up into a different outcome. A holiday recorded only in somebody's head, or in a document nobody opens, has exactly the effect of not having been looked up at all.

When the holiday is already inside the window

Sometimes it is discovered late, which is better than discovering it during.

The move then is to say so immediately to whoever is waiting at the far end, with the new date, rather than to hope the time can be made up. It very rarely can: the days do not exist, and the days after a closure are usually the slowest days of the year on the other side, because everybody else's queued work resumes at the same moment.

A revised date given early is an inconvenience. The same date given late, after the original has passed in silence, is a different kind of conversation and does lasting damage to how the next estimate is received.

The list worth keeping

For any counterparty used more than twice a year, one short list pays for itself within a quarter.

The fourth row is the only one needing attention during the year, and it needs about ten minutes a quarter. Everything else is annual.

The list belongs with the counterparty record rather than in a calendar, because a calendar entry shows the days and not the reasoning, and whoever inherits the relationship needs both.