You won’t believe what you can achieve in seven days.

For some people, Christmas is the highlight of the year, a festive blowout of shopping, eating, endorphins and conviviality. For others, a time to get together with one’s nearest and dearest, remember old Uncle Tom Cobley, get hammered, celebrate the passing year and reset the gauges for the next one.

Actually, such people are missing a trick: it’s the days between those two thoroughly commodified and stressful events – Betwixtmas, if you like – that are the real high point of the calendar. This is the period when employers shut the doors and compel their staff to take annual leave; when family obligations have been fulfilled and the yawning, soul-crushing disappointment of Hogmanay is still to come; when town centres are empty and you are free to do as you please. And this year, Betwixtmas runs, quite neatly, from Boxing Day on Monday 26 December to the grim and hungover awakening on New Year’s Day on Sunday 1 January.

In our time-poor world, a six-day stretch with no work and no obligations is too good an opportunity to waste by disconsolately eating marrons glacés in front of reruns of Come Dine With Me. This is time to be seized, savoured and used to its utmost.

Here are eight ideas to make the best of truly the most magical time of the year.

Silent swipe, ho-oly swipe… If you are free and single, and have time on your hands – or even, let’s be honest, if you fulfil only one of those criteria – it stands to reason there will be others in the same boat, who have sacked off the option of Christmas with the relatives and are ready to go out and play. According to a 2014 survey of Facebook statuses, the two weeks before Christmas is one of the most popular times for people to end a relationship, and many divorces happen in January. So the streets of London, LA, New York and Chicago will be full of newly single people (or those thinking about it), dressed up to the nines in Yuletide purchases, and prowling bars that are otherwise empty, given the post-Christmas lull. Go on, fill your boots.

Professor Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus is a stunning elaboration of the next phase in the development of planetary intelligence, as humans create machines that cannot match us in consciousness (ie, emotions), but far exceed us in in terms of knowledge and can, through their analysis of data, understand us better than we understand ourselves. It is also 448 pages long. And let’s face it, you have never managed more than a page or two before bed up until now. And of course you’ve been meaning to get up to speed on Mr Karl Ove Knausgård’s microscopic and unflinching examination of the failures of his life Min Kamp, but the various volumes of that already run to 3,600 pages. Well, now you have the chance to settle down with a pot of coffee, a blanket and plough your way through. Thus, you’ll be ahead of everyone else who got the books for Christmas. Result.

“Oh, Game Of Thrones is brilliant,” a friend told me. “Once you get through the first seven episodes…” Honestly, who has the time? Well, now you do; we all do. You can get up to regal speed with The Crown, finally catch up on all seven series of Mad Men, check back and see if The Sopranos was really the best drama ever made. But even if you only allow yourself time off for sleep, the odd 15 minutes for food prep and lav breaks, you’re only going to manage one of the above. GOT has so far run to 50 hours in total. And according to ratings firm Nielsen, it would take four days and 20 hours to watch all of The West Wing (without breaks). Another idea is to watch the first and last episode of every single cult series of the past 10 years: you’ll be surprised how little you miss and how successfully you can pretend to have seen the whole thing.

Post-Christmas, when everyone’s feeling bloated and poor, is a great time to try for those hard-to-get tables. Queues could be shorter for the fabulous smoky flavours at The Barbary in Covent Garden and reservations for chef Mr Merlin Labron-Johnson’s Clipstone more plentiful. Or try for one of the classics, old or new: Le Gavroche, The Waterside Inn, Chiltern Firehouse. Tip: Michelin-starred restaurants often offer great-value set menus for lunch, and you’ve now got time to sleep them off. Or best of all, pick up a cheap flight to New York and nab a table at one of the restaurants recently listed on eater.com’s hotlist: Augustine, Cannibal Liquor House, Nom Wah Nolita. The turnover of Parisian restaurants is mucher slower compared to London and N_e_w York, but you could consider a one-day Eurostar trip for lunch at LouLou in Paris, our pick for 2016.

There are various driving schools offering intensive one-week courses across the US and the UK, and with hardly any traffic on streets during Betwixtmas, it’ll be less daunting outside of gridlock. There are few pleasures to beat cruising through the empty streets of London or Brooklyn or Edinburgh, parking freely near your chosen shop or restaurant, or drawing up at a kerb to look at the glittering towers of Canary Wharf or Wall Street. If you can already drive, learn to master Excel spreadsheets or computer coding, so you can do your own accounts or future-proof yourself in a changing world; sign up for online tutorials for guitar and piano, or masterclasses in how to bone a leg of lamb or fillet a fish.  Or how about DIY, electrics, plumbing? A friend of mine learned how to plaster stud walls purely through watching YouTube videos. No time like the Christmas present.

If it’s got holes in it, or you haven’t worn it for eight months, either recycle it or take it to the charity shop. Be honest about what fits and what doesn’t and upgrade where necessary. Every man should have a well-fitting charcoal or navy suit, a woollen coat for winter and several smart white shirts, some well-fitting black and blue jeans, swim shorts that do not make you look like Sir Philip Green on his yacht, and T-shirts and underwear less than six months old. And it’s all there for you at MR PORTER (sale starts 26 December, 5.00am sharp – so finalise your Wish List and set your alarm).

If you have a website or blog, or even just an Instagram feed, get a professional designer to critique it and then edit accordingly. Maybe get a proper headshot done for your LinkedIn and Facebook profile, or at least get a friend to compose and shoot a well-groomed, well-filtered one for you. If you don’t want to spend the money or enlist a pal, just edit: delete the karaoke, cull the lame friends who leave lame comments and prune your Twitter garden – is that person you liked back in 2014 really still that funny? Look at how much you are posting, how many filters you use, how much stuff you are “liking” or retweeting. If you are on every social network going, cull the two that you use least. In an online world full of noise, brand clarity is key.

Writing may be 90 per cent perspiration, 10 per cent inspiration, but concentration also helps. Mr Paul Schrader supposedly wrote Taxi Driver over two drafts in 10 days, while living in his car. The first draft of Rocky took Mr Sylvester Stallone three-and-a-half days. Mr John Hughes allegedly cranked out The Breakfast Club in two days (though Ferris Bueller’s Day Off took six). A novel might be pushing, it but if Mr Fyodor Dostoyevsky could write The Gambler in 26 days while also penning Crime And Punishment, you should be able to churn out something Mr Jeffrey Archer-ish in six. Or, if you’re musical, how about a hit song? The Rolling Stones then-manager Mr Andrew Loog Oldham locked Messrs Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a kitchen overnight to force them to come up with one of their first self-penned songs, “As Tears Go By”. More lucratively, how about a gameshow that can be franchised internationally? Warning: this idea may lead to dangerous levels of procrastination.