vacation leaves

the past few days, i've been reading entries from a manager's blog, Ask A Manager. the entry i'm reading now is about vacation leave requests. in this entry, a writer who is a manager is seeking advice as to when to grant or deny leave requests. Ask A Manager's replies:

>look at what impact the leave will have on the work that needs to get done --- be the request made last minute or not. (sample: last-minute days off can sometimes work well. For instance, you had a really productive week, got everything under control, and now realize that you could take Friday off without impacting much. You often wouldn't have been able to know in advance that that was going to happen, but common sense tells you that you could do it now.)

>base policy on actual impact, rather than on rules for rules' sake

>let employees be adults and manage their own time

deng. if only my company doesn't require a 2 week notice for taking leaves. thing now, i tend to find out i can finally take a leave (after estimating workload based on deadlines, pending QC, project status, email replies, etc) only within the same week. (eg, i did work the whole week, the following monday seems lean or friday seems light, i'll take the day off then) before, i've tried applying for a leave weeks in advance but then eventually took it back since the workload for that week turned out to be different than i anticipated (due to new work, unexpected situations, etc).
then again, like what the author said "rules and bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake."