What Do You Do With Your Time Off?

January 26, 2011

One of my regular clients places a large order at the end of every month with a deadline for the end of the following month. Simple and straightforward to understand, I divide the number of words needed for the entire order and spread it out over the coming four weeks, generally down to a set amount of words each day.

Due to a late addition to an order a few months ago, I didn’t get the following month’s order through until well into the first week of the month, which meant I had a few hours each day of that week to spare.

It might sound strange to some writers out there, but I didn’t actually know what to do with that time at first.

I’ve been working with the client for over two years now and for every month during that time I’ve known that for each day of the week, I’ve had to spend a few hours writing for them. It’s kind of become a second nature and something that I now just factor into my working day.

When the need to dedicate that time was removed, it left me with a good few hours of empty space in my calendar.

At first, I was a little relaxed with the whole idea and thought I’d spend some time away from writing, catching up on the book I’m reading or play some computer games.

But then I realised I had the perfect opportunity to do the one thing I’d been failing to do in recent months — catch up.

Things have been a little manic lately and due to this, I’ve put certain things on the back burner temporarily or become a little lax with certain aspects of my freelance writing business.

Given the fact I had what equated to almost a full working day free last week, I put the time to good use on five separate aspects.

Updating my own blog

I’ve always loved blogging, but I very rarely get the chance to update my own blog these days. I put together several draft ideas and write a few paragraphs that I could use, but don’t often get round to finishing them off and publishing them half as regularly as I’d like to.

Therefore, one of the first things I did with my spare time was head over to my own blog, finish off a couple of the ideas and schedule them to be published over the coming weeks — the joys of Wordpress’s schedule feature!

Feature querying

My writing career to date has largely been based online. I’ve carried out a few print pieces for local publications, but I’ve devoted most of my time throughout the last few years to writing online.

At the start of last year, I decided that I wanted to expand my client base and portfolio and aim to have at least one notable piece published in print.

I started to send feature queries in late spring but put it off in favour of work when the summer came around.

With the free time, I looked through the list of publications that I was planning on sending a query to, amended some old ideas to ensure that they were relevant and up-to-date and sent them off.

It’s only been a short while but I’ve already heard back from a handful of editors who are interested in my ideas — it might not go any further, but it’s always a good feeling to know that you’ve at least got your foot in the door.

Reducing my inbox

Am I the only writer who opens their inbox on a morning, replies to the important e-mails and mentally files the rest away in a folder marked “I’ll do that later”?

The problem is, ‘later’ can sometimes be days or weeks after I’ve received the e-mail, occasionally due to the fact I put off reply a little too long but usually because it gets swept along with every other e-mail and so I made a concerted effort during my free time to go through my inbox and have a good clear out.

I replied to everything that was awaiting a reply, deleted everything that was spam, annoying or simply irrelevant and everything that was left I divided up into separate folders.

Developing my social network presence

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed that I went a little quiet for a few weeks before Christmas.

As important as social networking is, it doesn’t quite make it into my list of essential things to do as a freelance writer on a daily basis and therefore when things get a little hectic, I find updating Twitter slowly falls down the list.

After updating my presence initially, I looked into ways that I could continue to update it without it taking up too much of my time and all I’ve got to say here is that TweetDeck for iPhone could be the saviour of my social networking presence.

Preparing client work

I’m the type of writer who always meets deadlines, but who doesn’t tend to submit the work weeks before it’s due, often leaving it until just before the deadline.

Having had no complaints so far, I’ve started to realise recently that as I have a few regular deadlines at the start of the week and end of the month, if I planned the work out a little better and got ahead with some of the pieces, I could make my working week a lot less hectic around the time of the deadlines.

I looked ahead at a selection of deadlines that I had approaching and I started to put together ideas for them, writing at least a few paragraphs for each and for one or two, actually writing out the full piece.

It might not be much in the way of organising my work better, but it at least means I’m a week ahead of schedule for those clients.

When you find yourself with free time in your diary, what do you do with it? Do you take it as an opportunity to catch your breath and relax or do you utilize the extra time in a way that will hopefully benefit and help develop you as a writer?