I’ve been self employed for the last 23 years. It has advantages, name your own hours, work from home mostly, doing what you love to do. One of the downsides of self employment is getting sick. As a guy who writes programs for a living I usually can muddle thru a cold as for the most part if I keep my nose from running and shorting out my keyboard I can still send out the invoice at the end of the week. When being self employed requires you to go out in the real world, be it writing code, taking pictures, or other such fun stuff, feeling less than prefect is not well, fun.

While I have been rather heathy, this is my first cold in probably 5 years, it does make some parts of the job at hand harder to do. So my advise is if you can, take a down day (yeah probably not if you have a team of twenty descending on a photoshoot). Time spent recovering early in the sickness may keep you from having a longer illness.

You can still be semi-productive if you have stayed at home to recover. Things I like to do between hacking fits:

• Process  images I have not had time to get to.
• Clean up social media. Websites don’t fix themselves.
• Clean up email (unless that is what made you sick in the first place).
• Be feverishly creative. Make a virtual copy an image and see how far I can take it. Push that vibrance slider really far remove all clarity, twist it poke it, reverse it. Remember the have an excuse (I was out of my head).
• Don’t get overwhelmed by the down time.
• Research a new project or product that you have wanted to try. (Today I spent a couple of hours reading about a programming environment I might need to know for a new client. Geeky I know)).

Note: If it’s Mission Critical put it aside. It will take longer to fix if it more borked.

And just relax, take a nap, get better, and work at keeping yourself healthy.