Taking breaks between projects and notes from 12th March 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On the 12th March, six freelancers met in the Lord Nelson. A small but fun meet up, we chatted about various topics:
- Nepotism as a hiring strategy
- Turning a mess into a structured project
- Trying to work around cats
- Mt Gox payment arrives!
- Taking a break between projects
- Working with APIs which have incomplete documentation
- Some clients are surprisingly trusting about access to their websites
- TV shows cashing in on nostalgia are often terrible (looking at you, Section 31)
- Pork scratchings
- Using Perplexity – an AI that shows sources for the information its using
- Microsoft pulling back on AI spending
- How is MS Teams so rubbish?
- Copilot helping people pirate Windows
- Digital note taking – a convert from analogue
Taking a break between projects
It can be a good idea to take a break between projects. If you work intensely for a long time, you will need a break. If you’re working solidly on one project, when you’re finished is a perfect time to take a break and recharge before doing more work. For peace of mind, have another project queued up for after your break where possible. It’s a tough market at the moment and a break of a couple of months could turn into a much longer one while you find your next project. If that’s going to stress you out, have another piece of work lined up. This may mean compromising a little on the length of your break, so you need to think about how much you want the length of break vs the reassurance of knowing new work will be there when you’re ready.
Remember that you’re not an employee. You do not have to tell the client of your future project that you’re taking a break before it if you do not want to. Just say when you will be available. By all means talk about your holiday once you’re working for them, it’s nice to chat, but don’t feel you need to tell them you have time off planned before you work with them if you feel they might pressure you into starting earlier.
I’m more of an ongoing project person, so I can’t wait until the end of projects. I schedule breaks in, generally around school holidays as I’m a parent. As long as you give clients some notice, they’re fine with you having holidays/breaks. They take breaks too! If you have a client who constantly complains about you going away, work on replacing them with someone more reasonable. You are running your own business, you don’t have to deal with unreasonable expectations and it’s up to you to control that.
As a freelancer, you decide how much time off you take and when. You will have to manage your work levels around that. Want to take ten weeks off a year? That’s fine as long as you can manage client work in-between to fund your breaks. How much time you take off is up to you, but I urge you to take _some_ time off. Working all the time can be great for your bank balance, but it is not sustainable. You need to have breaks to work effectively over the long term.