Once again, life has happened and I have found it difficult to update this blog as regularly as I would like to. My goal here has generally been that I’d like to have daily posts on the topic of my writing life and what it means to be a writer. However, I seem to be stuck in this cycle where I fall behind and then I feel bad about falling behind which makes me disinclined to write more so I put off doing a new post even longer.
I’m a little bit embarassed about this. I would never let it happen on a blog that I do for my clients. I haven’t let it happen much on my other blog, Diary of a Smart Chick, which is a collection of thoughts about (and links to) the topics of my current writing projects. And yet it consistently happens here.
So, I want to make a commitment to writing for this blog on a regular basis. I won’t say daily because that might be too much but I want to get at least 3 posts up per week here. I have some exciting things planned for this blog in terms of some guest visitors, reviews and giveaways so I really don’t want to let things slide.
Here it is then - my commitment to this blog for my readers as well as for myself. I want to be present here on this blog so that it can become the kin of active conversational community that I know it has the potential to become. And I want to commit to it because this part of my writing life is important to me even though I let other things crowd in on it all of the time.
I would love to hear your thoughts about how to best make a commitment to your own blog when you write full-time for others professionally. Please share!
I’ve mentioned here a few times that I’m working on establishing and accomplishing a series of new writing goals. Those included:
- Cataloguing my work
- Getting published in more print magazines
- Finishing a personal book
- Doing more collaborative projects
I’ve added a few more goals to that list:
- Submitting work to anthologies
- Setting and achieving some clear goals for my 3 personal blogs
- Creating and executing a plan for more active promotion of my Hubs
Taking a look at my list, I’ve figured out that there is one specific writing goal that needs to come before everything else: getting organized!
I tend to be basically good at getting naturally organized. My freelance finances are in order. I’ve got my client’s files in good shape. None of that is a problem. However, I need more organization as it relates to these specific goals because there are areas where I’ve let things go. So, my specific goals for getting organized include:
- Doing my planning on paper. Several of these goals require creating action plans. I like to do those in my head but I’m actually going to do them on paper.
- Collecting all of my creative writing. I have poems, stories, essays and books that are written and half-written. They are in journals, on scraps of paper, on various computer files and who knows where else. Before I can reasonably submit work to anthologies and magazines, I need to be able to see what I have. This means learning about good methods of organizing this stuff and then going through the process of organizing it. That’s the big goal as far as this goes.
- Deleting all unnecessary files. I back things up all of the time and I have multiple copies of several things that I didn’t need to save in the first place. I want to get to where I only have what I really need again.
So, I’m still working on the bigger goals but I’m focusing right now on the small organizational goals that I believe will put me in a better place for meeting the big goals in the end.
I used to be really committed to taking a tech-free day every week. This was a day that didn’t allow for TV, computers or cell phone conversations. I was working A LOT of hours back then so it was an absolute necessity to take those days. But when I started working less, I kind of dropped the ball on this.
I’m thinking about instituting these tech-free days in my life again. I think it’s really important for me to unplug sometimes. The computer is the big problem. I spend pretty much all day on my computer. If I’m not working or reading or researching online then I’m watching Internet TV or playing Internet games.
I feel like if I turned this stuff off for an entire day every week, I’d get to do more of the things that I say that I want to do. I’d go wander around the city more. I’d do the creative projects that are always only half done around here. I’d sit still with myself.
I’m having a tough time re-committing to this though. I’m not sure what my hesitation is. I suppose that I should probably just take the leap.
Does anyone else do this?
People who read this blog regularly know that I’ve had some ups and downs with my writing lately and that I’ve been trying to set some new writing goals. There are quite a few goals that I’ve got in mind (see tomorrow’s post if those goals interest you at all) but the big one is this:
I’d like to take one year off from writing.
I love the work that I do but sometimes I feel like I’m getting burned out. I write literally hundreds of articles per month in order to be able to have enough money to pay my bills. When you write that much, you start to say the same things again and again without meaning to. You start to write without thinking. And you start to find it really difficult to work creatively.
I think that there are a lot of solutions to this problem but the one that makes the most sense to me is to take a sabbatical. I’d like to take a year off to just sit still and think about what it is that I want to do with writing for the rest of my life.
The fact is that I’ve always been a writer. I think I will always be a writer. But I’m not sure what that means. I don’t know if I want to write books or keep blogging or set some other writing goals for ten years down the line. I’m not sure if I want to write full-time forever or if I want to write part-time and then do some other creative work part-time. I may want to go back to school at some point.
The problem is that I don’t feel like I can make those decisions during a time when I’m still writing. I feel like I need to step back and take a breather. I need to put things in perspective. I need time to listen to what my own heart is actually saying without having to also hear the clatter of the keyboard.
So that’s my big goal - to take a one year sabbatical in order to be able to make some solid heartfelt decisions about where I want my writing to go from there.
I won’t actually be doing this for awhile. I have some other writing goals I want to meet first. And I have to put some financial things in place. But what I’m working on is a three-year plan. I’m hoping to work solidly at writing for the next three years and then to take the fourth year off.
What do you other writers out there think about this? Has anyone else taken a sabbatical from their writing career? Did it work for you? Would you like to do it?
I mentioned here in yesterday’s post that I enjoy the fact that the writing business means constant change. It’s true that I enjoy the changes that happen in this line of work. However, I have to admit that sometimes the changes mean stress. The biggest cause of this is what I call the swinging door of freelance writing. Clients are constantly opening doors and closing them on us due to their own situations and financial restraints.
This affects me more than other writers because I strive to take on jobs that are going to be ongoing. I don’t apply for one-off jobs or short-term jobs (like writing a single batch of articles). I just feel that it requires too much effort on my part to learn the terms and style of a client that I’m only going to write for once. Also, I really like to promote my own work to improve web traffic for my clients and that’s hard to do when you’re only writing for them once or twice.
Since I take on jobs that are designed to be ongoing, I get hit harder when those jobs end. It’s frustrating to build up a portfolio with a client, get used to using their system, get good at promoting their specific type of work to the right industries and then to be told that they just don’t need you or can’t afford to keep you on anymore.
I counterbalance this by steadily applying for new ongoing jobs. I check freelance job boards on a near-daily basis and apply to all of the ongoing jobs that appeal to me. There are only about 1 or 2 per month that I actually get all the way through the hiring process of and decide to work with them. Still, this means that there are 1-2 clients per month that I’m learning a whole new system for (and often a new industry as well!)
And each month there are 1 or 2 existing clients who need to lighten the work load or let go of me altogether. So the swinging door continues. I’ve learned to accept this and to not get too worried about it. I know there will be other jobs when one ends. Nevertheless, I would say that this is one of the bigger sources of stress in my life as a freelance writer.
It’s been awhile since I’ve been active on this blog. My activity here seems to go in spurts. The reasons for delays are many and varied, of course. Recently, there have been two big causes for being quiet on the blog. The first is that I ended up going out of town and didn’t have a lot of time to be online while I was gone. The other is that I’m working on a new writing schedule and I’m still trying to figure out where my personal blogs fit in to that.
I’ve got some new plans and goals for my writing life. I’m still in the planning stages of setting those goals. As I create them and commit to them, my need for a more efficient writing schedule is changing again.
Messing around with the schedule that I keep is something that I do regularly as a freelance writer. I do my best work in the morning so I try to get a lot done though. What “a lot” means changes, however, depending on whether I’m currently more focused on blogging, bigger writing projects or social promotion stuff. I also play around regularly with which 2-3 days off per week I want (weekends vs. weekdays is always a big questions for me). And finally, I’m hoping to take some extended vacations in the next couple of years so I’m trying to schedule for that as well.
The new schedule is almost worked out. When it’s ready, I’ll be back to writing regularly again here. And I’ll have a lot more to say about my specific goals and plans as a writer.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about your thoughts on a writing schedule. Do you keep one? What’s the part of it that changes most often?
I wrote on this blog recently about how there are a lot of people out there who seem to think that they can just start freelance writing with no experience in order to easily earn some added income during this recession that we’re in. Daily Freelance Writing Tips had some great additional thoughts on that topic which got me thinking more about why exactly it is that freelance writing is actually so much harder than most people assume it to be. Part of the difficulty is definitely that there is so much more than just “writing” that you have to be able to do to earn a living at this kind of work. But honestly, I think that the most difficult thing for most people is to find the self-motivation to actually work from home when they are at home.
Being productive when working from home isn’t easy for most people. Common problems that people who are new to this kind of work will have include:
- Sleeping in. It’s fine to sleep in as a freelance writer as long as you work late to make up for it. If you’re not working full time then you aren’t going to pay the bills.
- Procrastination. Many new freelancers procrastinate because they think that their deadlines are all that they need to worry about. In reality, you need to get things done and then spend the rest of your work day doing supporting-role tasks like social networking, marketing and learning new blogging and writing skills.
- Taking long breaks. It’s easy to get distracted by house chores, phone calls and errands during the work day when you’re not clocking in at an office.
- Staying in your PJs. There are some freelance writers who do this and who still get their work done. I find that it’s important for me to actually get up and get ready as though I’m going to a job so that I can feel like I’m really going to work. Then I spend the day working. Of course, I don’t dress in business casual wear but I do shower and put clothes on.
- Failure to set hours. It’s important for freelancers to have a basic schedule that they stick to. Most people new to the work just can’t do that. This inability tends to make it so that they don’t work as many hours as they should.
These are just a few of the things that happen when you’re trying to learn to work from home in a productive way. You discover that it’s not easy to be productive from the space that you normally consider a place for rest. You find that there are too many different things to get done and no one looking over your shoulder to make sure that they get completed. I think that for most people this is the toughest part of the job and the reason that they can’t make working from home work for long periods of time.
As for me, I have always loathed having to go to a job. I hate having to be somewhere else at the time someone else says I need to be there. I hate having to wake up to an alarm, where the right kind of clothing, put on a happy face for my co-workers and commute to a place of business. This distaste for that way of life motivates me to make working from home work for me.
What do you guys find is the hardest thing about trying to be productive when working from home?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my tendency towards multi-tasking. I have always been someone who naturally does several things at once. I flit from here to there throughout the day, moving back and forth between projects and websites, and my mind is often on something that has nothing to do with the task at hand. Lately I’ve been wondering about the pros and cons of multitasking as it relates to my writing work.
First I have to say that there are basically three types of writing work that I do - work that I’m paid to do for clients, blogging that I do for myself and creative writing offline. I think that multitasking affects each of them differently.
Multitasking is often the most efficient thing for me to do when it comes to the work that I do for my clients. This is all ongoing work so I can create a basic schedule that allows me to move back and forth between projects to get everything done by its deadline each month. This also breaks up the monotony of some of the jobs by interspersing more interesting (or at least different) work into longer projects.
Blogging for myself is much this same way. My approach to blogging for myself tends to be that I blog when something comes to mind that I want to blog about. I head to my site, write up a quick entry and publish it. However, there are longer more researched pieces that I do sometimes as well and I’m not sure how mutli-tasking impacts them.
In regards to creative writing … I think that multi-tasking is a positive thing when it means that I have multiple projects in various stages of completion. However, I think it’s negative when I’m moving back and forth between them a lot because it prevents me from sitting through that uncomfortable stage of “figuring it out” and actually getting somewhere with my work.
What do you think? Does multi-tasking help you or hinder you in your writing process?
I have found through conversations with other people who write for a living that most of us have the same problem when it comes to our personal writing projects. That problem is that we don’t take them seriously enough as “real work” to make time for them in our work days. We make sure that we take care of our other writing first because “that’s what pays the bills” and often end up having no time left for those writing projects that really excite us.
I’m working on a few different projects right now that I do for myself and not for money. A couple of my blogs are this way, the poetry project I mentioned earlier this week in the post on collaboration is this way and it is this way with the book that I’m working on which is based on my blog San Francisco is Sexy. I am excited to have these projects going on because they are writing that comes from my heart instead of from a job application that I made at one point or another.
However I do easily fall into that trap of putting off this writing while working on my paid writing gigs. It’s not so much a problem with the blogs. I’ve gotten into the habit of writing my blogs during my normally scheduled workday due in part to the fact that these blogs link to my other work and promote it so it feels kind of like “real work”. But I’ve definitely had to learn to make time in my work day for the poetry and book projects.
It’s easier said than done. At the start of each week, I commit to spending a certain amount of time on this work. Then things get busy, plans get changed, deadlines creep up on me and I find myself struggling to get everything done. At the end of the week, I haven’t worked on these projects much and I find that I either have the choice of not working on them at all or of taking my free time on my weekend to work on them. Neither is really preferable to me.
Slowly, but surely, I am learning how to set aside a chunk of time during each work day to devote to these projects. Right now it’s just half an hour per day but that adds up to about ten hours per month and that adds up to something tangible in front of me on the computer. I do this because I want to take my own projects as seriously as I take those projects that I’m being paid to complete.
What do you do to make sure that you have time for personal writing projects even though you work on writing for a living?
“Thank God it’s Friday because to me Friday means I can work for the next two days without interruptions,” John Hope Franklin.
One of the things that I constantly play around with as a freelance writer is when exactly I want to take my “free time”. I’ve tried working a Monday through Friday and taking traditional weekends off. Sometimes that’s great because it allows me to be on the same schedule as everyone else which makes it easier to coordinate both work-related things (like interviews) and social things with other people who work a normal schedule.
But at other times, it has seemed better to work through the weekends and to take my days off during the week. Sometimes I’ll take two days in a row mid-week and other times I’ll take two days apart separately during the week. Having days off during the week has a number of benefits. It’s great for being able to do things alone - like going to museums or browsing through thrift shops - because places like that are empty on weekdays and there aren’t a lot of people demanding my time.
And, as highlighted by the quote above, sometimes it’s nice to work on weekends. Or rather, it’s nice to be creative on weekends. Work for many freelancers means interviews and answering emails and searching for new jobs online. We spend many of our working hours doing tasks that rely in some way on interacting (usually virtually) with others. On the weekends, nobody expects us to answer our email or pick up the phone so it’s possible to do the real work of being creative without those other tedious interruptions.
For me, no single set schedule has ever worked best. I try something for awhile and then I change it again. Or I alter my schedule to adapt to different projects that are going on or different obligations that I may have. But I keep trying. I think it’s important to be able to work on the schedule which suits you best, both professionally and socially. That’s one of the major benefits of working independently, even though it can be one of the more difficult parts to figure out.
Beyond anything else, I think the key is balance. It’s important to take free time and it’s important to make sure that you are also putting in enough hours on the job. Whether those hours are in chunks of five days work / two days off or blocks of time throughout each day or whatever, it’s important to keep defining the right balance for yourself as a writer and making sure to carve out a situation that allows for that balance so that you can always be at your best.
