No profession is safe during the holidays. Whether you work in customer service, education, business, or freelancing, the smell of turkeys in the air and visions of way-too-early Santas at the mall are invariably accompanied by stress, too much work (or too little work), and general holiday depression.  

I apologize in advance if you are one of those people who rallies during the holidays, donning cute little red aprons and cooking your body weight in gingerbread. I know you’re out there dying to shine a little holiday cheer on my gloom. Don’t bother.  

For the rest of us, here is a guide to getting through the holidays as a financially and mentally sound freelancer. 

1)     Plan for the work to back off. Most businesses (with the primary exception of retail) slow down between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Not only are businesses and people taken up with planning and shopping for the upcoming festivities, but budgets always get a little tighter as the fiscal year comes to a close. Few websites are launched amidst all the holiday rancor. Marketing plans all but come to a stop unless they are retail- or holiday-related, in which case they have already been planned and created months ago. Magazines and printed publications also focus heavily on the holidays, meaning that unless you wrote a good Christmas article and submitted it back in August, you won’t be getting a piece of that action either. 

2)     Plan for family members to come out of the woodwork. Most of us probably already know that when you say to a family member or friend that you are a freelancer, what they really hear is that you have oodles upon oodles of free time at your disposal. This intensifies as the holidays draw near and time seems to be the one thing everyone is lacking. Who better to house Aunt Mildred for the month of December than Freelancer Fanny, who is home all day anyway? Who better to perform a few hours of pro bono babysitting than Work-From-Home Wallace, who surely won’t even notice the addition of two small children? 

3)     Plan on different revenue sources. Even though landing new clients probably won’t take up the bulk of your time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you can use the holidays to your advantage. Many businesses send out holiday mailers and/or cards; they may need someone to create them. And businesses that don’t send them out might be open to a little persuasion.
Holiday newsletters and year-end reports might need to be written, and even family what-we’ve-been-up-to-this-year letters can be outsourced during this busy season. 

4)     Plan for a little business restructuring. We’ve already discussed several times on the Freelance Parent blog how the details of running a business sometimes get in the way of the work that we really love to do. Although it might not be your ideal way to spend a month, now is a really good time to review your previous year and make plans for the future. Look at the goals you set for yourself and adjust them accordingly. Determine if old revenue sources are falling short. Come up with new marketing plans. Get all that crap off your desk and into a filing cabinet! Just because business slows down as far as clients go doesn’t mean that your own business doesn’t have plenty of work to keep you busy.  

5)     Plan for taxes. They’re coming, and they’re coming faster than we’re ready for (just like the holidays). Instead of waiting until a panic-stricken April 14 arrives to get your receipts, expense reports, and other tax forms in order, do it now. Depending on whether you had a really good or really bad year, this might even help you to adjust your own personal holiday-spending budget as well.  

6)     Plan to enjoy yourself. It isn’t just the glory of freelancing that keeps us all challenging ourselves to grow and succeed; it’s the freedom that comes with setting our own hours. I think we can all pretty much assert that the suit-wearing, 9-to-5 lifestyle isn’t for us, yet that doesn’t stop us from checking our email every 10 minutes and getting one last article written before we go to bed. Use the holiday season to really kick back and remember that you are your own boss. You will be fine if you turn off the computer for a few days and just enjoy all that the season has to offer (even if that means watching Scrooged and vacuuming pine needles for the umpteenth time).     

Happy Holidays!

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