I didn’t take much leave at the beginning, and built up 240 hours (30 days, the max you can carry from year to year), and now I get 20 days of leave/year so I always use all 20. I try to use some for real vacations and some to teach music in the local schools. Soon I am going to Asia for 2 weeks!
I get other sick days, and just take a full day off when I go to the dentist or eye doctor etc. I hardly ever use them to call in sick for the day (knock on wood).
A lot of people in the federal government just take off for a week or two at the end of the year around the holidays to spend their extra leave.
I also enjoy being incapable of working at home. Though, a couple years ago, because of the office I was in, I did drive to work at 0300 in a fairly decent snow storm to prepare a morning briefing, which was before the office was closed. It did close later, but they kept us at work until we put together a brief for the next day, since our colleagues that were going to arrive at normal time were not going to show up… lol.
Well if we lived in France, we’d have to take all our vacation and also would not be allowed to read emails after work hours and on weekends (we’d be breaking the law!).
Most big corporations do not allow people to roll over more than a week or two of PTO - including sick time. People generally use that rollover as their ‘emergency bank’. Not me, I take it. Life is too short.
I had clients in France and also hired subcontractors in France. Sometimes I would need a conference call where I had to find a common time for people in the US, W Europe, Russia, China and Australia. Part of working internationally is give and take - I will take this conference call or monitor my email in the middle of the night my time if next time around it’s at a time that is convenient for me. I don’t know how they think they will get any international business done if they are “forbidden” to go off hours.
My H gets 3 weeks now but his company doesn’t give any paid sick days or personal days, so he usually takes only 2 weeks-- not in a row-- and expects to use the remaining days for emergencies, sick days, doctor visits etc.
This fall he plans to have hip replacement surgery and so he will not be using any of his vacation days-- he needs to save them all for his post-surgery recovery.