When things pile up in your personal life, does your freelance writing business suffer?

The past few weeks have been nothing short of manic.

I took the first two weeks in January off to go to New York, which whilst fantastic and something that I wouldn’t change for the world, it meant I had two weeks less in the month to get everything done.

Most of the regular readers know that I work in a 9 to 5 job as well as writing and when I returned from New York, I found out that we were getting an inspection by Ofsted, the organization that ensures every educational business is providing at least satisfactory provision to learners (my 9 to 5 role is in Work Based Learning).

Given two weeks to prepare, the inspection is this week and so it seems like the last two and a half weeks I’ve done nothing but work almost solidly, stopping only to sleep, eat and shower.

I thought I was managing to keep all the plates spinning until the middle of last week when my post here on Get Paid To Write Online was due to be published.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I tend to finish work before the deadline,  but don’t submit it until the deadline is due (or just before).  This bit me in the ass last week as whilst I had the post ready to go, alongside the busy work schedule, my computer and internet decide to stop working.  Just like that.

After rushing around trying to get online, I managed to borrow a friend’s computer (and internet), proof the post and get it published.

Couple this with the extra hours I’ve been putting in with businesses, making a concerted effort to take on new clients and trying to keep on top of everything with writing, the 9 to 5 and my personal life, it’s no wonder the emergency cigarettes have been getting a beating lately (I don’t smoke much, but I buy a pack of 10 that lasts me a good few months usually…just not this time).

All of that could have been avoided if I’d put more thorough preventative steps in place to ensure that any problems in my personal life don’t affect my freelance writing business.

As is usually the best – or at least the most common – way, I’ve learned from my mistakes and have now put the following measures in place to (hopefully) ensure nothing from my personal or 9 to 5 work life affects my freelance writing business in a negative way in the future.

1.  Prepare and schedule

A lot of the work I do is writing blog posts for clients, just like I do here.

The way I used to work was I would write down a few ideas for posts, save them as drafts and then a few days before the post was due, I’d go to one of the ideas and write it out in full, scheduling it to be posted what usually worked out to be the next day.

What I’ve decided to do now is complete at least a week or two’s worth of posts at once, check and edit them and then schedule them straight away.

It’s a bit of a strange routine to get into at first – or at least it has been for me – but the benefits are endless, mainly the fact that I don’t have to think on a weekend “Right, I need to write this post on Monday, these two on Tuesday, this one on Wednesday…” and can focus my thoughts and time in other areas of my work.

2.  Scrap the stated deadline

Following on from the above point, something I’m really trying to do is to stop delivering work to a client on the day (or the day before) they give as a deadline and deliver it on the deadline I create, which depending on what the time scale is, usually works out to be at least three days before the deadline from the client.

I’ve got into a few close calls recently – including here last week – where I’ve almost missed the deadline.

In all honesty, it was a stupid approach and something that I should have changed earlier.  Almost missing the deadlines lately, however, has given me the kick up the rear that I needed to do something about it.

3.  Utilize any spare time properly

Combine the excitement of getting engaged with coming back off holiday from somewhere you love and that empty feeling after Christmas and you find it’s particularly difficult to concentrate.

Wanting to plan an engagement party, look at photos from New York and watch the DVDs I’d got for Christmas, every spare moment I got in January seemed to be spent doing something other than working, even if I was just in the middle of writing a few blog posts.

I’m a massive fan of rewarding yourself with five or 10 minute breaks every hour or two you work, but because I was finding it hard to concentrate as it was last month, my five minute breaks were turning into 30 minute ones.

I’m still ‘rewarding’ myself with breaks, but I’m being particularly strict with them, only taking five minutes and making sure I’ve finished a piece before I do take a break, as I hate the feeling of having a break and coming back to a piece of work that needs finishing off.

4.  Keep work and personal lives separate

Due to things naturally being busy lately, my personal life, freelance writing business and 9 to 5 work have all seemed to merge into one.

I was doing writing work when I was having a break from the 9 to 5 work, running personal errands whilst I was having my lunch and writing when I was supposedly relaxing and enjoying my personal life.

This can be fine and a great way to get things done normally, but it’s not great when you’ve got so much on that things start to blur and your ‘Things To Do’ list seems to go on and on and on.

I’m now doing my utmost to keep everything separate, right down to not having my laptop on whilst I’m watching TV with my Better Half – 10 minutes into the programme and I’m usually picking up my laptop and saying “I’ll just have a look on…”

5.  Sleep

My body clock is shot and I need to do something about it.

I don’t function all that well in the morning and work my best on an evening.  I’ve been like that for years, preferring to get up later and stay up until three or four o’clock in the morning.

Having to be at the 9 to 5 work before 8.30am lately for the inspection and not getting home until gone 6.45pm, throw in a good few hours writing and consulting work on an evening and I’m not getting to bed until 1.00am.

Things get worse on a weekend when I stay up late and get up late – great if you can get into a routine after a few weeks, but not so great when you only have two days off.

I haven’t got this point sorted out yet, but I’m really hoping through February to start getting back to having seven hours sleep a night, as I’m certain by falling back into a good, regular sleeping pattern, I’ll be wider awake and more alert to tackle everything and manage when things do get hectic.

In every freelance writer’s life – or in fact anyone’s life – things do get a little out of control occasionally and whilst it can get a bit wearing and have an effect on different aspects of your life, as long as you’re prepared properly, there’s no reason why this effect has to be anything other than minimal.

Image:  bluegum (stock.xchng)

I have a system – and as a writer, I need it. When I started freelancing, it wasn’t hard to keep track of my clients – I didn’t have that many of them. Now, it’s different, and I need to be very organised to keep on top of my writing business. Here’s a peek at how I organised my writing.

My Filing System

First of all I have a folder called ‘writing projects’. This is at the heart of my organisation and I make sure that this folder is backed up both online and on an external hard disk. Once inside the folder I have several key sub-folders. There’s:

• a folder for bidding, which has both copies of successful bids and samples
• a folder for clients, which is further subdivided with a sub-folder for each client and, if necessary, for each project.
• a folder with copies of contracts
• an invoice folder, with archive folders sorted by year. Once an invoice is paid, it moves into the archive folder, so I always know which ones are outstanding. Each invoice has a number and two or three letters representing the client’s name. (For example, all my invoices for ParkRideFlyUSA have the suffix PRF). This makes it easy to identify invoices for a particular client at a glance.
• a personal folder – for personal writing projects, including my ebooks and anything not for clients, though increasingly I tend simply to create a fake client and include personal writing, such as my Suite101 articles, in the writing projects folder.
• an archive folder for uncategorised writing jobs from previous years
• Finally, I have a folder for my newsletter.

I also have a separate folder for the blogs I run – with a subfolder for each blog. Copies of all posts, images, themes and customizations are stored here.

The key to using this system successfully is to file regularly. If it’s not in the right place, you will never find it, in spite of the improvement in desktop search tools. Having a good filing system means I don’t have to worry about forgetting what I’ve called a job.

Planned Improvements

How could I improve it? There’s only one thing I will implement for 2010. I will include the job numbers for each project in the file names wherever possible. I already number each project for invoicing purposes, but I use descriptive names in the client folders because I’m much better with words than numbers. Linking the two will complete the circle, making project tracking even easier.

How do you organise your writing work?

(Photo by ladyheart )

I was chatting with a friend the other day and we got to talking about skills. Specifically, how to parlay the skills you’ve acquired into something that’s useful for building a freelance writing career. Transferable skills have been a career development buzzword for some time now, and that’s exactly what you need as a freelance writer. They turn up in the oddest places, too. Here are a couple of examples of transferable skills that can help you in your writing career.

Research

Way back when I did a BA – in modern languages as it happens. I don’t use them much unless I travel, but I did learn something from that process that helps me every day – how to research. Researching is not just about finding information, but about sifting it and triangulating it. (Triangulation is a fancy way of saying you should check things from multiple sources so you can make sure there’s a common core of information that’s likely to be right.) Good research is also about checking that your sources are reliable. I’m more likely to trust health information from the Department of Health than from someone who’s trying to sell me something. Although I research more on the web than in books, the skills I learned then have stood me in good stead now.

Organization

If you’re planning a writing career, then organization is key, and the skills you need are not specific to writing. In any job you have done, you will have had a list of tasks to complete and a way of keeping track of them. That’s a good starting point when it comes to managing your writing business. If you’re managing your own business, you need to know when work comes in, who it’s for, when it’s due out and what pay you will receive. Subbing work out makes it even more complex, as I’ve discovered in the past. Think about whether you have used any organizational systems that will help you streamline your writing career. If you think of any, let me know, as I’m always open to new ideas.

What skills do you use in your writing career that you learned in other places?

(Photo: somadjinn)