You are the freelancer! You are the one-person company. You are the marketing department. You are the accountant. You are your own PR. At times, you even act as a PM if you outsource. However, the most important thing is that you are the busy translator/interpreter. If you are a mother or father of two lovable little monsters, it may get even worse. The amount of emotional pressure you get from all those activities on a daily basis have a bearing on your well-being: Stress… nervousness… and consequently, meltdown.

Just think about it for a second. When was the last time you went on a holiday with or without your family just to get away from all that one-man show? You may find time to get some rest every now and then but your brain needs to be unplugged for a little while to recharge too. Hard to stay away from marketing yourself you say? You think if your clients cannot find you, you might lose them? Not really. There are ways to give yourself a break. All you have to do is to get connected for a minimum amount of time everyday and prepare beforehand. Let’s get you ‘holiday’ efficient, shall we?

You will have to do more than packing before taking that flight. After all, you would want to enjoy your lousy snack and tomato juice at 30k feet above before hitting to the beach, right? By being proactive and taking action before going on a holiday, you can give yourself peace of mind and disconnect from work life. Here are a few practical tips.

Networking when not-working

Facebook is for your beach pictures and fancy dinners and you will use it heavily while on a holiday to ‘advertise’ how happy you are. Instagram is the same for most, but twitter is for networking. If you are using twitter to connect to colleagues and stalk potential clients, not posting anything for a week translates into losing precious followers. So, how can you be away from your laptop but still tweet?

Feedly: Your eyes need a break from that blue light of your laptop or tablet screen occasionally. When you are away, you won’t be able to find content to share related to translation or interpreting, or whatever field you are interested in. That means you have to find them before leaving the house for a few days. Feedly is a great RSS reader. It collects posts from blogs for your reading pleasure. All you have to do is sign up and fill in your desired keywords like translation, marketing, localization, etc. All those links it collects for you will be useful in using the websites below. Just get the links for each post and you are ready for the following step. Alternatively, you can also use DiggReader. If you sign up with your twitter account, Digg also collects posts by your twitter friends.

Hootsuite: Now that you have some content to share, it is time to, well, share. Apart from being an amazing dashboard to manage your twitter account, this useful web app has a nifty feature of auto-tweeting. After logging into the site with your twitter details, you will see a dialogue box at the top that says “Compose message”. When you click on the box you will be able to type your tweet, add a link and set up an exact time and date as to when the tweet should be posted on your behalf. You can set the number of tweets for each day you are away. It shortens the links to blog posts as well. Fill in everything and you are good to go. There are other alternatives to check out too like AutoTweeter and TwitterFeed. I cannot comment on how good they are as I don’t use them but that’s a “feed for thought” for you!

Notify to clarify

You have direct clients and agency clients that send you work continuously. Cash flows like a river. You are lucky. However, when you are away and they need you but cannot find you, you risk losing a valued client. Letting them know about your “me” time beforehand might reduce that risk. If you have a colleague working in the same language pair that you outsource and trust, referring them to your clients while you are sipping your margarita on the beach might do the trick. So how to clarify the reason why they won’t be able to reach you? A simple email letting them know you are travelling next month, or even phoning them should suffice. For all other enquiries through email from potential clients and that PM from a third world client wanting to assign you work in exchange of peanuts, the below tip should be useful to some.

Auto replies

Your email client has a useful feature called automated replies. Gmail has it, and Outlook has it too. Type a well-worded reply to everyone sending you an email somewhere in the lines of:

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, I am not available from …(date)… till …(date)… During this time, I will have limited access to the internet but I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Be professional and concise. No one needs to know how you are planning to get drunk and strip down to your underwear in front of a bar-full of people in Ibiza.

If you wish to be contacted via your mobile – although I don’t recommend you do that and it sort of defeats the purpose of ‘unplugging’ – you can add this sentence:

However, if you need immediate assistance regarding your translation/interpreting/copywriting… etc. needs, please reach me at (your phone number).

If your trusted colleague is the designated person for any work-related enquiries, you can add their email address to the automated reply. And don’t forget to let those colleagues know about it beforehand.

If your enquiry needs urgent attention, please reach my colleague … (name of colleague)… via email at …(their address).

Can’t help re-connecting?

After all you have done so far, you still can’t part with your laptop or tablet while getting that suntan? That is fine too, only if you do it for a few minutes everyday and don’t let your workaholic instincts plague your beach time. Set a fixed period of time, for instance, fifteen minutes after lunch. Check your twitter feed to see if you have any DMs that need replying to or if a tweet resulted in a reaction from your followers and you can’t help answering. Log on to your email to see if an email needs a reply. I suggest you limit these activities for a very short period of time though. However, Facebook and Instagram away to your heart’s content. Your enemies should see you are having loads of fun so that they can comment on your beach bum while being green with envy!

To the moon and back?

You had the time of your life. All rested with many a great memories and an empty wallet. You are back home to a full inbox from a few current and potential clients. You are dying to reply all and keep the cash coming in. That’s great. However, I recommend you to schedule your return flight or train a couple of days before that dreadful Monday. That way you will be able to recover from the exhaustion and perhaps jetlag all that journey back home sadly provides you with. A day before you wish to start working again would be spent replying to all those emails, DMs, blog comments etc. Yet, I still wouldn’t try to handle everything on that day but ease your way into work. Let your body and mind adapt to the return to inevitable that is work.

These tips are not exhaustive and I am sure you have other ways to ‘holiday’. If you are a workaholic and do not know how you can give yourself a rest once or twice each year, the above tips should help you jumpstart your recharging period. Remember, even well-oiled machines need maintenance regularly.

Deniz Aker

@LinguALaTurca, English-Turkish Medical Translator, publancer, cake lover, word fetishist.