Bernskiold Media

Planning For Vacations To Get It

It is summertime and that can be a complex time for being a freelancer. On the flip side, we have the ability to take out our vacation whenever we want, however, on the down side, vacations can be hard to schedule. Being in the middle of this scheduling period myself, both as a blog writer and designer, I’m going to share some tips on how you can gear up for a vacation and take some time off!

Blog Writer

• As a blog writer, you have a big advantage unless you cover breaking news stories. You can schedule posts. I’m sure you might already to that on a weekly basis already so it won’t be much new things other than the fact that you might do it for two weeks in a row. Think about topics well in advance, several weeks before the time you plan to go away (at least a couple), and start to write the articles for those weeks. You’ll be doing double writing for some time, but just take the time and do it well in advance! It’ll lower the stress levels later on.
   
• Currently what I am thinking about myself is regarding the social media. It is really the first major summer holiday time that we’ve had the big influence in Twitter for example and how to manage it while you are away is now a new problem that you haven’t really been faced before. I don’t believe that scheduling tweets over the day is the way to go. I’ll even go as far as saying it is destroying the principals of Twitter. I very well think that you can have an automatically posted tweet when a new post goes live (which I have myself). What I am thinking of doing is ask some friends to help me promote some of the tweets by retweeting and generally linking for me. Otherwise, depending on the vacation, I might log into Twitter too as it is more of a fun thing than a work related thing for me. You can also just announce that you go away and won’t be tweeting for a while (but be mindful of the fact that burglars could read your Twitter).
   
• As for emails, comments, possible advertisement requests and more you might get. I’d just set up an auto-responder on my email address announcing that I am on vacation and when I am returning, thanking them for the email. It’s the age-old trick that still has a good purpose.

Web Designer

Here it gets a bit more tricky. When being a designer, developer, writer or anyone who has to look after clients, you have deadlines to meet and clients to make happy. You might also have incoming estimates that, if they don’t get a quick reply, might not opt to wait. I would do a couple of things to prepare here as well.

• As before, with the email, you are probably going to have to put an auto-responder on your email account saying that you are on vacation and when you are going to be returning. You might not think it, but a lot of clients will understand it. The ones that don’t you may not want to work with either way.
   
• Make sure to plan out a schedule for what you want to have done by when and alert your client about the fact that you are going to be away, well in advance. Let him/her know the planned process and try to make it as good as you can. Preferably, have your vacation planned out a long time in advance so that you know when it crops up that your client might just have to expect that week or two delay in the project, or not scheduling anything then at all.

Planning is the key for any type of freelancer or blogger. If you carefully schedule and plan your regular activities during this/these week(s) you are going to be away, you can likely have a relaxing vacation without needing to check back on everything all the time. The most important thing is that you can get some time off, fully off, and recharge your batteries.