How you can turn 17 days of annual leave into 42 days of holidays in 2017.

I am definitely not one to tell you what to do and how to live your life, but you should probably sort out your annual leave for 2017 now and book in these exact dates for your holidays.

Why? Because we can make sure you turn 17 of your designated 20 days off into 42 blissful days of annual leave.

All you have to do is think a little bit strategically and follow these plans.

Step One: Sort out your public holidays

For the sake of this example, I’m going to use NSW public holidays. But don’t stress too much — state by state, the fundamentals are the same and it will only change really minor details about what dates you’ll need to book in.

For 2017, these are the NSW public holidays:

• Sunday, 1 January
• Monday, 2 January
• Thursday, 26 January
• Friday, 14 April
• Saturday, 15 April
• Sunday, 16 April
• Monday, 17 April
• Tuesday, 25 April
• Monday, 12 June
• Monday, 7 August
• Monday, 2 October
• Monday, 25 December
• Tuesday, 26 December

We won’t be using every single one of this public holidays to sort out our leave, but we’ll be using most.

Step Two: Plan your holidays around these days

January:

Naturally, we’re going to start in January. In 2017, Australia Day will fall on Thursday, the 26th of January. All you have to do is take a day either side of that Thursday and you’ve got yourself a five day break.

It should look a little something like this:

Total leave taken = 2 days.

Total break = 5 days.

April:

April gives us a heap to work with because of Easter, of course. And next year, just a week after Easter falls ANZAC Day, which gives us a nice break to work with.

Ideally, this should give you a 12 day break.

Let's have a look at how it can look.

Total leave taken = 5 days.

Total break = 12 days.

June:

And now we've hit your winter break. The Queen's birthday falls on Monday, June 12, so we'll use this as our base. All you need to do is take the Thursday and Friday from the week before.

Total leave taken = 2 days.

Total break = 5 days.

October:

For October, we're going to find a way to take four days leave and walk away with a nine day break using NSW Labour Day. You can see on the calendar below, the month starts on a Sunday. So obviously, we can include the Saturday as part of our break too.

Total leave taken = 4 days.

Total break = 9 days.

December:

So far, we've had 31 days off. And now it's time for a bigger and better Christmas break. We're turning four days off into 11 days leave.

Total leave taken = 4 days.

Total break = 11 days.

So, how does our maths work out?

In total, if we take just 17 days leave at the right time, we can walk away with 42 days worth of holidays. And that's not even including the three other annual leave days we didn't even use, plus the public holidays we didn't even include.

You're so, so welcome.