After nine months of writing daily on Medium, I’ve just taken my first holiday from the site. Even better, I hadn’t originally planned to take any time off. Despite feeling a little burned out, I had decided I wouldn’t take a break until the holiday season.

This changed when my best friend extended an invitation to join him for several days in Montreal. It was an opportunity to reunite as we no longer live in the same city and a moment to celebrate some major milestones in our lives. It was wonderful and if you’ve never been to Montreal, it should be on your bucket list!

While I was thrilled with the unexpected chance to have a fun week with my bestie in a fabulously cosmopolitan city ‘dans la belle province,’ I was worried about my activity on Medium. At a time when many writers are expressing concerns over changing algorithms and decreased viewership, I was fearful that a prolonged absence would effect the upward momentum I had built over the summer months.

I’ve always been a firm believer that when you’re on holiday, work should be the last thing on your mind. I knew that the moment I boarded the plane I didn’t want to think about anything writing or content related. I wanted to enjoy the fun, peace, and adventure of being away from my routine.

Knowing that I’d have plenty of time to catch my breath and chill during my week off, I engaged in some advanced planning to limit the effect my absence would have on my reader engagement.

Writing in advance

Typically, I write my stories a day or two ahead of their publication — unless I’m submitting to a major publication where I just submit a story when it’s ready. In a normal week, I write one Medium article a day. During the week prior to vacation, I wrote two articles a day with one article being set aside for publication during my week away. While this created more work for myself, I knew I would have a whole week of relaxation to make up for it. By the date of my departure, I had five extra stories ready.

Easy topics

Given that I would be unable to go back and update stories once I was away from my home office, I decided my extra articles should be non-time sensitive and cover more general topics that were easy to write about. I wrote several articles for my Top 3 publication, and writing and freelancing tips. This made my life much easier as I didn’t require any extra time engaged in research like I would with more involved topics. I wrote the extra articles in an hour or two including the time it took to edit them and ready them for publication.

Schedule for later

With my extra articles written, I pre-scheduled them for publication. I identified which pieces would be suitable for a major publication and submitted them the morning of my departure. I did this knowing that most major publications like Startup and The Writing Cooperative take 3 to 5 days to publish stories, therefore, they would be published while I was away. My remaining stories were set to be published independently using the “schedule for later” feature found in the ready to publish button.

Brief check-ins on the Medium app

While I had intended to be entirely free from Medium for the week, I realized that I still needed to take a few minutes each day to promote my stories. Using the free WiFi in the hotel lobby, I took ten minutes at the end of each day to quickly promote my stories on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Additionally, I responded to any comments or messages that had come in during that day. Once this was done, I promptly turned off my phone and went back to my vacation. This method provided only a minimal disruption to my holiday, and because I had pre-scheduled the articles for publication, it was just a matter of cutting and pasting the links.