With most students taking off for Christmas break and getting ready for the holidays and regular employees are able to take vacations as a freelancer you don’t always get that liberty. Even as a freelancer you still need to make sure you’re able to take time off, especially if you’re busy and during the holidays. I had a instance with a client who had contacted me the day for Thanksgiving to do a project for them and I agreed because it wasn’t that big of a project but I still made myself available to them. When Christmas came I promised I wouldn’t do that and would take a few days off and this year I was able to. The week before Christmas I had 4 on-going projects mostly Mobile sites and WordPress/Kentico development and I didn’t want to have to work on them to meet the deadlines. I guess I could have taken into account the holidays when giving the client a time frame but I wasn’t thinking and gave them my regular 1 week which made a couple deadlines fall on Christmas Eve.
Because of this most of last week was spent working on 4 projects from 8am to 2-3am the next morning. I was extremely tired and still had to find time to do my school work because since I go online I don’t really get a break like everyone else. Luckily I got everything completed and was able to take off Friday, Saturday Sunday and Monday to do absolutely no work and just hang out. Of course I also started using a Project Management tool called Collabtive which so far is by far the best project management tool I’ve found and will probably be using it for some time. It allowed me to set all communication tasks, milestones and make changes and mark them off as they were complete. I was also able to finally get all my invoicing setup through Freshbooks which since I get most of my projects through Elance I might not be using it as much but it’s still nice to have when I do need to send invoices.
With the time off I took I was able to not have to worry about work, left my phone in my room and just spent time with my family which was refreshing. When I came back I had been contacted about 3 more projects and was able to secure them all which is nice. I also gave them a bigger time frame since New Years is coming up and I don’t want to have to rush through everything and risk messing up or forgetting something.
I guess the moral of this story is as a freelancer most of use work from home, don’t have strict deadlines unless set by the client and sometimes make ourselves more available than we should. It doesn’t hurt to sometimes just ignore that phone going off in the other room and take a break and just relax. For me, this week gave me break I needed and I come back more focused, ready to start working again and ready to begin a New Year and putting a full year of freelancing behind me.
