Freelance work is inherently cyclical. Colleagues in corporate jobs often ask if the cycles make me crazy. The answer is no, but that answer has come with time and experience. Rather than fight the cycles and worry about when they will start or end, I’ve learned to relax and ride it out.
January is a mad dash to incorporate in-house edits for projects that were hurriedly opened in mid-December to meet end-of year deadlines. Everything is an all-out frenzy until the final week of January when things get blissfully slow and allow me to focus on the year ahead.
February is the quiet month. You can almost hear the crickets chirping. This is my networking month, the 28 days that I spend meeting clients and other freelance colleagues for lunch and coffee. It’s social and invigorating and a dramatic contrast from my busy months where I barely look away from the screen of my MacBook.
Just as I get bored with that, March arrives, bringing with it another mad dash from clients who are suddenly handed budget that needs to be spent before the end of Q1. Late nights are followed by early mornings as I juggle work and life, some days more successfully than others.
This cycle repeats itself with each new quarter: busy first month, slow second month, crazy third month. I’m familiar enough with the pattern that I’ve stopped panicking when things get slow, and come to appreciate the famine months for the welcome balance that they bring to the feast months. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t prefer the workload to be more evenly distributed, but rather that I’ve grown to have a better understanding of my business and my clients.