The day off Claude gave back
Themes: App featureUser story5 min readBy David Lawrence
This is the first of a new kind of post on the blog: a short story about how someone used Clockflux, told with the details that make it useful. It comes in two parts. The first is about a day off that turned up where nobody was looking. The second is about how you can do the same for your own country.
Part 1: a day off nobody knew about
A Clockflux user in Switzerland had a few vacation days left and no plan for them. They had connected Claude to Clockflux, so instead of counting days in the calendar they asked Claude to plan their remaining holidays. They didn't say where they live.
Claude noticed something anyway. Thursday 31 December was booked as a personal day, and that's a date that is often a day off already. It asked whether it was a public holiday for them. It was.
A vacation day that was already free
Some time earlier, while filling in the calendar, they had marked 31 December as a personal day off by mistake. That's what you do for a day you plan to take. In Clockflux a personal day is vacation, and it comes out of your holiday allowance.
In Switzerland, though, 31 December is an official day off for them. Clockflux calls those official days, and an official day doesn't use any allowance. So the calendar had been charging them a vacation day for a day they would have had off anyway.
What Claude noticed
The conversation below is a recording based on what happened, with made-up numbers. It starts from the Plan my remaining holidays request that Clockflux offers to assistants, which asks them to build long breaks around public holidays and weekends. To do that, Claude reads the year's days off, and a vacation day on a date that's often a holiday stands out.
Transcript of the example
- You: Plan my remaining holidays.
- Used get_days_off
- Assistant: You have 6 days left to book this year. One thing first: Thursday 31 December is booked as a personal day. That date is often a day off anyway. Is it a public holiday where you work? If it is, it shouldn't use your allowance.
- You: Yes, it's an official day off in Switzerland. I booked it by mistake.
- Assistant: Then I can mark it as an official day off, and you'd have 7 days left. Shall I?
- You: Yes please.
- Used set_days_off
- Assistant: Done. Thursday 31 December is now an official day off, and you have 7 days left to book. If you take Monday 28 to Wednesday 30 December, and Christmas Day and 1 January are public holidays for you too, you're off from Friday 25 December until Sunday 3 January, ten days in a row, for 3 days of vacation. That would leave you 4. Want me to book it?
Why it depends on where you live
Claude couldn't know that 31 December was a holiday for this user, which is why it asked. Clockflux has no calendar of public holidays: you mark each one yourself, and nothing in the app knows your country or your canton.
In Switzerland that matters more than usual. Only cantonal laws can set official holidays, and 1 August is the one federal exception, as the SECO overview of Swiss public holidays (opens in a new tab) explains (in French). Geneva, for example, has a law on public holidays (opens in a new tab) that lists "31 décembre, anniversaire de la restauration de la République" next to New Year's Day, Good Friday and Christmas, and the canton's official calendar (opens in a new tab) gives Thursday 31 December for 2026. In another canton the same date can be an ordinary working day, so what counts depends on where you work.
What it changed
One more day to spend, and a better plan. In Geneva, for instance, Christmas Day, 31 December and 1 January are all public holidays, so three vacation days on 28, 29 and 30 December turn into ten days off in a row.
Part 2: let Claude add your country's official days off
You don't have to wait for a mix-up to find out. Instead of marking each public holiday by hand, you can ask Claude to add the official days off of your country, and Clockflux records them for you. Here's the same kind of conversation for the following year.
Transcript of the example
- You: Add the public holidays for 2027. I live in Geneva.
- Used get_days_off
- Assistant: Geneva's law on public holidays lists nine. In 2027 two of them, 1 August and Christmas Day, fall on a weekend, so seven are left to add: - Friday 1 January - Friday 26 March (Good Friday) - Monday 29 March (Easter Monday) - Thursday 6 May (Ascension) - Monday 17 May (Whit Monday) - Thursday 9 September (Jeûne genevois) - Friday 31 December They'd go in as official days, so none of them uses your holiday allowance. Shall I book them?
- You: Yes, book them.
- Used set_days_off
- Assistant: Booked, seven official days off in 2027. Your allowance is untouched, and each change is listed under Recent changes by assistants in Settings.
How to ask
- Tell it where you live, as precisely as the holidays require. In Switzerland that's the canton, in Spain it can be the region.
- Ask it to add the public holidays for the year, this one or the next.
- Read the list it proposes, and say yes when the dates are right.
It books them as official days with the same tool it used for 31 December. Weekend days are skipped, as in the calendar, an official day is always a whole day, and none of them touches your holiday allowance. A day you'd already booked as personal is switched, and the assistant gets what it was before, so it can put it back if you ask. Official days show with the 🇨🇭 flag by default, and Pro lets you pick your own country's flag.
Check the list first
Claude works from what it knows or can look up, public holidays vary by region, and your employer may follow a different calendar. Read the dates before you agree. The calendar docs describe the four kinds of day off, and the holiday allowance docs explain what uses your allowance and what doesn't.
What you need
Every change an assistant makes is listed under Settings → AI assistants → Recent changes by assistants, with the values before and after, so a wrong date is easy to put back. This needs Clockflux Pro and a connection that's allowed to make changes. We described the controls in the post on letting your assistant fix your hours.