Organizing Your Freelance Writing Career

When I published the readers’ interview the other day, there was a follow up question from Melissa, who said: ‘I was hoping to find out how you schedule your time and keep organized’.

This is a difficult area for many writers, especially those who are juggling multiple commitments. In the past, I’ve done the ‘work till you drop’ thing, but it’s not good for me personally, nor is it good for family life. To create the life that I want while keeping my writing career going, I’ve had to accept that I can’t do it all. So what does that mean in terms of getting organized?

Key Tasks For Writers

There are several key tasks that writers have to do to manage their writing careers successfully. Only one of these is the writing. However, getting work in and attracting new clients are also important, so it’s essential to set some time aside for these tasks. When you work at home, you may need to get some human interaction from time to time. That’s where social networking, forums and online chats come in. These are not timewasters, but essential parts of keeping yourself healthy and balanced.

Maxmising Productivity

One of the advantages of the freelance lifestyle is the ability to adapt to changing priorities. Generally, I take a disciplined approach to my work. I usually start writing by 8am. Before that, I have already checked and responded to urgent email and spent some time with my friends online. Ideally, the next task should be bidding for work, but since I write best in the morning, I usually leave any simple bids till the afternoon. This means that I use my time productively.

I write until lunchtime, take a short break, and continue writing (including bidding for new work) till it’s time to pick my daughter up from school. Then it’s family time until she goes to bed at 7pm. I usually do another email check and spend some time with my friends online. Depending on whether I’m expecting anything urgent, I may do another check before going to bed.

Marketing And Promotion

There are also lots of tasks that I slot in when I need a change of pace or have some down time. These include promotional tasks such as updating my online portfolio, doing some article marketing, changing profiles on sites, submitting blog posts through the social media, entering blog carnivals, writing guest posts for blogs and much more.

Achieving Balance

Is this the most efficient way of organising my time? Who knows? It allows me to write at my best writing time, slot other tasks around that and still spend time socialising online. I get to spend time with my family too. I’m not claiming to be the best organised writer in the world, far from it, but I think I’ve achieved a reasonable balance.

Photo: mconnors