photo credit: stev.ie

We’re basically in the Christmas season (well, I haven’t put up my tree yet but I know lots of people who had theirs up BEFORE Thanksgiving!)

Christmas can be a challenging time for freelancers because there could be a lot of dead space in the week between Christmas and New Year. This year, it has the potential of being really quiet because Christmas falls on a Friday, which means that from the 24th to the 4th – essentially a week and a half – there might be nothing. But not in my case. I plan to take some time off but I’ve purposely planned to put in a couple of days of work during that time. (I like having the time off, of course, and I’m a point in my career where I can, but that wasn’t always the case).

So, you need to work a bit over that Christmas-to-New-Year week, or you want to work then, but there’s one other problem: Clients! They aren’t thinking about getting work (and they’ve spent all of their money on gifts so they’re shy about paying someone to do more work for them).

Here are a few ways that you can stay busy over the Christmas season:

1. Spread out your work. If you normally get projects done earlier in the month, spread them out a bit over the month. Obviously, you don’t want to disrupt any publishing schedules you may have agreed to but if you can, consider it.
2. If things look really quiet, advertise some kind of crazy 24 hour turnaround on a last minute project. Lots of people have stuff they wanted to do in 2009 but ran out of time to do. You can help them get it done fast. Keep it festive for yourself, though, so that you have fun doing it!
3. Be proactive. Let your clients know that 2 or 3 days will be workdays for you during that last week of December and tell them that you aren’t taking on any new clients during that time – it’s time you’ve set aside JUST for favored existing clients. Ask them if there’s anything they need done. Or, better yet, recommend something. You are a professional, after all, so perhaps you can put on your professionals’ glasses and observe “I’d like to see you going into 2010 with an improved [whatever]. Do you want me to work on that for you over Christmas so you can have it in place by the New Year?”
4. Work on your own business. Sure, this doesn’t generate you any revenue now, but maybe you could use those few quiet days to pre-write some blogs or write your business plan for 2010 or start on that passive income project you’ve always wanted to do.
5. Prewrite some work. This is actually what I’ll be doing during the Christmas season: I was so busy this year that I was running up against deadlines each and every day. It was exhausting! So to mitigate that next year, I’m going to prewrite content the month before. Obviously I can’t prewrite everything (like time-sensitive projects) but I can prewrite a few projects to help me get the jump on the month.

If you want to take time off this Christmas, do so! But if you need to or want to work, there are things you can do.