What's your secret for getting off work to hunt?

I earned 350 hours vacation per year, was salaried and worked 50-80 hours per week. I took off 1 month per year. Donated a lot of time and vacation, you weren't paid for it. No one ever argued with me about it. Now we are retired and that is the best job I've ever had. Spend a couple months fishing in the spring, largely because my wife loves to fish. Then spend 3 plus months in the fall scouting, hunting and camping in the mountains. Nothing extravagant but boy do we enjoy it.
Sounds like what my wife and I are after.
 
To me, it largely depends on where you do you hunting and what your expectations are. If you hunt close to home, I know some guys who work in a machine shop, and their day shift works 5am to 1pm. They hunt and fish more frequently than anyone I know. Likewise with the mechanics where I work - similar shifts. Some of them fish walleye all afternoon for 4-5 days a week all summer.

Have a good friend who works a lot from home as a production engineer, and he never seems to have a shortage of hunting and fishing time, but its all close to home as he has to have internet.

If going on week long or longer trips is the expectation, then a guy has to maybe get a little more creative as far as jobs, especially if he has a family. There's the small businesses men who've opined. Certainly a good way to some day have time and money, but not everyone is cut out for running a business, and all successful business owners I know didn't just find that success in a cracker jack box; instead it was hard earned over many years of way above average work and hours.

At my job (full time FF/P), we can trade our shifts and get nice blocks of time off, but it comes at the cost of working multi day swings when paying guys back, which isn't too popular at home when a guy is away from home paying back the time he owes at work from the time he took to go on a hunt that was also away from home. But it works great if you're single.

A friend of mine works at a factory where they do 3 and 4 - 12 hour shifts on alternating weeks. So if he plans it right, 3 shifts of vacation gets him something like 11 consecutive days off. Seems he's always going here or there for a week or two. I know of a couple Police Departments who work similar 12 hour schedule rotations.
 
School teacher here. It's harder to take time off and write sub plans than it is to go in to teach, but with that said I do take time off...
My previous principal was also a hunter. He and I would would use our sick leave as mental health days and go.
My current principal is more "left leaning" I will say, and I have to use personal days, of which I'm only allowed to roll over 2 from the previous year and get 3 new, totalling 5 each school year.
 

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