Writing — It Pays To Get Organised

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 )