By Jill Pyle

As work starts to wind down for the year, you may find yourself with more spare time than usual. Rather than aimlessly surfing the Internet, consider catching up on some of the things you pushed to the side when deadlines were looming.

Revisit your bookmarks
If you don’t use a social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us, you probably save most bookmarks to your browser. Take some time to review your bookmarks and get rid of any that you no longer need. If you’re married to the practice of saving bookmarks in your browser, create a folder structure and get organized. If you’re feeling adventurous, sign up for del.icio.us and explore the wonderful world of social bookmarking.

Clean your desktop
The files that end up on my desktop are usually only temporarily relevant or valuable. Assuming most of your files are stored on a personal drive or within a set of folders, now is the time to do a clean sweep and make sure all of your documents are saved where they belong.

Grab editorial calendars
Most publications have made their 2008 editorial calendars available online. Think about the work that’s charted out for January and see if you can find the editorial calendars for any of the publications you’re planning to pitch.

Catch up on your reading
If having the time to read industry blogs is usually a luxury, here is your chance to catch up. If you use an RSS feed reader, today might be the luck day you see zero unread items. Take a few minutes to look over the feeds you subscribe to, remove any you’ve lost interest in and add some new ones to your collection. If you don’t have a feed reader, get one. I recommend Google Reader.

Send holiday e-cards
There are a bunch of really neat holiday e-cards floating around. Head over to ElfYourself, personalize a card and send some holiday cheer to your family, friends and colleagues.

Build out your social network
If you’re a member of social networks like Plaxo, LinkedIn or Facebook, now is as good a time as any to upload your address book and add some new contacts.

Content development
While it might be hard to push aside thoughts of baked goods and shopping lists, January won’t be nearly as stressful if you start drafting the content you know you’ll need finalized first thing in the New Year.