Freelancing Online

Writing from Home: Four Self-Induced Time Traps
By Elizabeth Clark Wickham

Congratulations. You’ve finally succeeded in setting apart a block of time for your new home-based freelance business. Perhaps you’re making headway in juggling a two-year-old, a five-year-old and your editing work. Or you’re managing to work at the dentist’s office in the morning and extract your novel’s chapters in the evening. Along with adjusting your own lifestyle, such as reducing TV-viewing to add more hours to your day, you’ve triumphed in training those around you to interrupt you minimally during keyboarding time.

But before you dub yourself the king or queen of time management, you may want to take a closer look at how you spend your actual working time. It’s easy to attribute failure to others’ interruptions, but sometimes poor time usage is self-induced.

Inadvertently, these four time traps may be stealing your valuable freelance minutes:

 E-mail

Downloading and answering e-mail is part of the business. You need to send query letters and hear from editors, discuss a word rate with a client, or network to get the interview you need.

But some e-mail, while seemingly business-related, may be subtracting actual working time. For example, have you been too absorbed in swapping chit-chat with other writers? For an eye-opener, calculate how much time you spend dealing with e-mails versus how much time you spend actually writing or editing.

You can also slash e-mail time by doing the following:
 Keep a folder of standard e-mails (a sample query or rates proposal, for example) to copy and modify.
 Send clean, well-written e-mails but ignore your perfectionistic streak and don’t deliberate for hours over word choice.
 Answer e-mail promptly as pile-ups cut back on efficiency.
 Maintain well-organized e-mail folders and subfolders; this will save you time when needing to refer to past e-mails.
 Set a timer and spend only that amount of time each day answering e-mails.
 Separate personal e-mails to handle later.

 Online multitasking

When you surf the web, stick to business. It’s easy to multitask online, searching for airline tickets for summer holidays while you look up statistics for an article on bad posture. Or it’s hard to avoid checking out your old university roommate’s new website while you download writer’s guidelines.

Nonrelated multitasking, however, usually has two effects that slow you down. First, it leads you down rabbit trails. Usually one interesting webpage leads to the next, and before you realize it, you’re lost in cyberspace. Second, nonrelated multitasking splits your mind, giving way to daydreaming. Daydream about your writing, not about e-Bay purchases! Keep on track.

For strictly business web surfing, it’s smart to write down a short list of what you actually want to do online. Then you may open four windows and do everything at once, but you’ll be ensuring that your searches have to do with your work.

 “I’ll forget” prompts

Mental distractions are easy to act upon when working from home. You’ll remember that you didn’t put macaroni on the grocery list or that you didn’t thank Uncle Bert for the Christmas check. And the urge will be, “If I don’t do it now, I’ll forget. I’ll just take a quick break.”

Quick fix-it breaks at home are a common trap because everything is within reach. If you were at an office, you wouldn’t be able to “just pop” the laundry into the washing machine.

But getting up from your desk to tend to one of these epiphanies usually leads to another short job and yet another. By the time you return to your senses, you’ve lost 40 minutes.

One solution is to keep a “bother list” handy, a sheet of paper or a notebook next to your work area. If anything unrelated to work nags your neurons, just write it on the bother list. The new motto is “On the list, out of mind” and you can continue to freelance.

Later, when you’ve finished working, consult your bother list and take care of each item to your heart’s content.

 Good reading

When you begin to freelance, you need to read lots of articles to understand what you’re getting into, what rights to offer, how to improve your queries or which markets to pursue. All of us are indebted to the valuable information we’ve received from numerous websites, authors and fellow beginners.

As you continue to freelance, you still need to remain abreast of your field. You’ll find yourself interested in articles describing the newest editing software, book reviews and successful writers’ insider tips.

But let’s face it: You could easily spend the six hours you normally dedicate to your business perusing interesting, well-crafted articles – helpful articles! Yet if those articles detract significantly from your actual business, they’re not so helpful after all.

If reading is your self-induced time trap, try saving your reading for certain days or time slots. If you run across an interesting article online, click “Save as” and download it to a “Read later” folder. And then dedicate your allotted reading time to that folder and to other books.

So... may I ask what you’re doing still reading this article online?
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Elizabeth Clark Wickham is a freelance writer, editor and translator based in Europe. For more information about her, visit www.complete-edit.com.