3 Classic Holiday Spoilers for Freelance InDesigners And How to Avoid Them

The holidays are almost here! It’s time for gatherings and giving, for rest and reflection. And designers and production folks all around the world are finishing up the last of their 2016 projects before taking a much-deserved break.

It’s wonderful, isn’t it?

Well… maybe not for some freelance InDesigners who we spoke to. It turns out the holidays are also come with a few big party spoilers. See if any of these sound familiar.

Holiday Spoiler #1: Should I Be Working?

“Can I afford to unplug?” is one of the most stressful questions to answer at holiday season. For freelancers, no work means no income. So what do you do, sacrifice the holidays? Ideally not; the trick is to find the right balance, and for that, you need to allocate your time wisely. If you need to be earning or have deadlines to hit, you need to plan your schedule in advance and stick to it. Protect both your work and play time from distractions. Get the jobs done, then plan something epic for your free time.

Holiday Spoiler #2: Waiting for Feedback

This one can be the most frustrating. Working days are counting down fast, but you’re still waiting on design feedback. It can feel like everyone else has vanished into thin air. No comments, calls, emails, nothing. Just silence. Until…at the last minute you get a ton of changes back which will take hours to make. Deadline missed, holiday plan out the window.

GoProof can help here.

Everyone checks their phones regularly but not everyone checks work emails. This makes the GoProof mobile app for iOS and Android the perfect platform for requesting and sharing feedback.

It’s immediate, fast, and convenient. Status updates for ideas, rework, and approvals are fed into the app as they happen. Notifications to view or reply are pushed onto the lock screen just like a social alert, so you’re always engaging your reviewers immediately.

And in the main GoProof website app you can easily see who has or hasn’t looked at your work, along with a Nudge feature to send to reviewers if they haven’t responded. Again, this pushes a notification to phone screens and gets designs signed off faster.

Holiday Spoiler #3: I Can’t Help Being Creative!

If you’re like some of our InDesigner friends, having time off is inspirational. Different environments, new experiences, and having a bit of time to take it all in stirs up your creative juices. The result? You just have to get the new ideas out of your head, and you find yourself back in front of a screen (voluntarily!) when you should be resting and relaxing. It’s a trait of creatives—and so is being stubborn. Family and friends may not understand your InDesign addiction.

One thing that can head off trouble is finding a way to quickly capture what inspires you—without interrupting the moment. To help with this, Adobe has developed several mobile apps like Capture, Comp, Sketch, and Draw to help creatives quickly create, use, and share ideas, colors, artwork, and layouts from anywhere.