# How Much Time Off the Buffer Team Took in 2019

In this analysis we’ll take a look at the number of vacation days the team took in 2019. This analysis excludes people that joined after the start of 2019 and people that left at some point before the very end of 2019. You can read more on Buffer’s vacation policy here.

Here’s a quick summary of the data.

• The median number of vacation days taken in 2019 was 18.5.
• The minimum amount of vacation taken in 2019 was 9.5 days.
• The maximum amount of vacation taken was 38 days.
• A quarter of the team took 15.5 days or less.
• A quarter of the team took 24 days or more.
• On average, team members in the US took the least amount of vacation.
• On average, team members in South America and Europe took the most.

## Entire Team

The plot below shows the number of vacation days taken by each individual. Each dot represents one team member. Vacation days are counted in half-day increments.

The boxplot below includes some more information about the distribution of vacation days taken. The left side of the box represents the first quartile, or the 25th percentile. The line in the middle of the box represents the median, and the right side of the box is the third quartile, or 75th percentile.

The length of the box represents the interquartile range (the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile).

# get quantiles
quantile(vacation\$vacation_days)
##   0%  25%  50%  75% 100%
##  9.5 15.5 18.5 23.5 38.0

The minimum amount of vacation taken in 2019 was 9.5 days and the maximum was 38 days. The median was 18.5 days. Around 25% of the team took 15.5 days or less and another 25% took 24 days or more. Approximately 50% of the team took between 15.5 and 23.5 days.

Now let’s break this down by department.

## Vacation Days by Department

The graph below shows the distribution of vacation days taken in 2019 for each department. The Finance department was grouped into the People department since there were only two team members. The Eng: Reply department was excluded because it only included two members. These two team members took 17 and 25 vacation days respectively last year.

When it includes the Finance team members, the People team took the least amount of vacation days, on average. The Eng: Infrastructure and Eng: Core teams took the most vacation days on average last year. The departments are sorted by the median number of vacation days taken by members of the department.

Let’s visualize the distributions with boxplots.

Next we can represent each team member as a dot, with the color representing the department.

## Vacation Days by Region

Now let’s visualize the distribution of vacation days taken for team members that live in certain regions of the world. The regions were defined arbitrarily.

We’ll consider the UK to be a part of Europe for now. Two regions were excluded because they only included one or two team members each, and they could be personally identified.

On average, team members in the US took the least amount of vacation in 2019. On average, team members in South America took the most, however the 75th percentile for European team members is significantly higher.

That’s it, thanks for reading!