I always enjoyed working from home for few hours and having much more spare hours than regular employees who have to sit in work no matter, if they have actual work or no.
But since I don't wanna be potentially replaced by competition I haven't taken vacation in years (that was not problem before since I was not that busy and could rest enough every day to have free morning or afternoon) and I don't won't to refuse any projects to miss on money I can't imagine taking vacation, because I'm not gonna lose only vacation expenses, but also similar amount in lost income for every day I would not work.
Oh and I forgot to mention because of my partner company is in China I can't follow even my European holidays (while living in Europe), meaning I worked even on Christmas, yesterday and today and have only few free days during CNY and October golden week (but none of them actually as long as in China since I get anyway more tasks in advance or some Chinese will give tasks to us even during Chinese holidays).
The best case scenario would be if my partner company decreased amount of projects, since I would be perfectly fine even with half money I earn in exchange for saving half of the work hours without me rejecting anything, but that doesn't seem realistic.
So how would you justify taking unpaid vacation with family under such circumstances? As I see it now I will give family vacation, meaning wife and children can enjoy different place (beach) and I will work from hotel room, possibly finding few free hours in early morning or late afternoon and free weekend.
For me the question is entirely reversed. I have to justify to myself giving up my time for a client or employer. The natural state is for me to fart around, I wasn't put on this planet to commute to a cube.
I do it because it allows me to achieve my goals - things like having fun experiences, donating to charity, helping out family and friends, being a useful human.
If I did it 24/7 then those goals would fade into irrelevance because I'd have no time to pursue any of them.
I had wrote a longer post, but I've edited it, because I think really this is the key take-away. Do you work to live, or live to work?
Sounds like the client sucks if you can't slow down or stop or control anything, dump them or start saying No. If you are going to lose out to the competition by saying No, then it sounds like you aren't providing any real value, you are just cheap labour that is replaceable and are getting paid poorly and incorrectly for it.
The point of being self employed is so you can do whatever you want and own your life. If you get good clients then you can get paid more, they can't afford to lose you or easily switch because of the value you provide and are willing to work with someone who has reasonable human needs. You can take projects without hard fixed deadlines or with vacation time booked in and get paid on the project, not by the hour or even day. If you provide real value, they'll want you back for the next thing.
If this were a standard situation within Europe/the EU, I'm confident you would be entitled to claim the rights of employment, including e.g. paid holiday. It's possible that this right would extend to a Chinese employer, although I'm not sure.
If you are genuinely self-employed, you should also have the freedom to employ other people to cover your work.
Normally the typical advice when someone who is self employed has too much work is for them to raise their rates, but this works much better if you have more than one client since that does mean that you still have some clients to fall back on otherwise...
For your specific situation, I'm not sure what to say, apart from advising you to try to get out of this situation by 1) finding other better paying clients and 2) slowly reducing the tasks you do for your current client to the more value added tasks.
Also note that without some vacation you are slowly drained which leads to less productivity which leads to no contract renewal. Burnout is also a real risk.
I would use the vacation to perhaps find a 2nd customer even if for a few billable hours/month, just to start another business relationship...
Even if you love your work, you don't love it every moment of the day.
Sure, if you're close to a breakthrough invention to cure cancer, or have to race the competition to the first patent, and this urgency is credible and has a likely and credible high-payout in the end, you can crunch for a finite amount of time. But just churning out one project after the other with no end in sight, skipping holidays, makes absolutely no sense.
I'd take a holiday as soon as you can, talk to your company, and also look beyond your company. There's plenty of us making a decent wage without working like a 18th century factory worker that is denied a Christmas holiday. Working for Chinese wages in a country with European costs also makes little sense to me. There are surely other companies available to work for.
A variation that I first heard from Lori Edwards: "The people you really work for are waiting for you at home."
There is a hierarchy of ways that you can provide value to a client. I call it the TKPV ladder. Each letter represents what you provide in return for compensation.
T stands for time. At this level, your client pays you by the hour, day, week, or even minute. Your value is measured by the time you put in. This is the lowest rung of the ladder. While you have some control over your allocation of time (as opposed to with an actual job) this is not really much different in principle than working at Walmart or Starbucks. You are a wage slave.
The next step up on the ladder is K, which stands for knowledge. If you can promote your relationship with your clients to this rung, your value becomes the knowledge, experience and ability you bring to the table, which is measured by its value to the company, not by the number of minutes you've slaved at a task.
The next rung on the ladder is P, which stands for product. At this stage, you transition from selling knowledge and talent to selling a specific product or service that wraps up the knowledge and talent that you and your team have acquired into something you can sell to a customer, hopefully without too much customization. And then sell to another customer, and so on. If you reach this stage, you have productized your value in such a way that you can produce and sell it at scale.
The final rung in the ladder is V, for vision. At this level, you take your vision for future products and services to people who are in a position to provide you capital and support to expand and scale your reach to its maximum potential.
In my Consulting business, when I deal with clients, I try to keep this hierarchy, TKPV in mind, with the goal of moving up the ladder at every opportunity.
I am just putting some thoughts together for what we ought to be doing for the big Enterprise SEO client we mostly work for.
I hope you wont mind if I borrow this