The Unemployed Writer

If you are a writer like myself and have considered yourself one for long enough to be halfway confident in your ability to put coherent sentences together to form decently compelling prose, you are probably ridiculously disorganized. It comes with the territory. The imaginary guild of aspiring writers requires that all properly serious writers live in a disheveled mess with half finished work on every flat surface and only one clean spoon, sitting precariously atop a coffee maker.

It is this very trait that keeps so many writers from actually becoming freelance writers and making money from their talents. If you can’t find your computer under the detritus, how can you reply to the emails that are starting to pile up? Not a good combination.

Unfortunately, for those of you who are only partway down the road to freelance writing, this is the first thing you need to tackle. Fortunately though, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it and you can get a few pointers right here on those first steps.

As I mentioned in my post from last week I started my freelancing career by overdoing just about everything. I wrote massive schedules that were often two pages long and longer than most of the articles I had to write for any given day. Also mentioned in that post is how quickly I managed to overcome that phase and starting getting to the nitty gritty of my writing much faster.

The first thing I learned was that you have to peel away all of the extra stuff. You haven’t even started writing you, so don’t go too far. Do away with any extra curricular writing and focus all of your energy in getting your things straightened out for your first project.

1. No personal projects. Blogs are a great way to relieve stress and seek help online, but when you are just getting started, you’re just spliting your foucs too many ways.

2. Set aside designated time for each task you need to accomplish. At first, you will likely still have another job. Don’t try to fit in a few minutes of research or writing every day after work. Set aside two hour blocks before or after work or on th weekends.

3. Clean your home. This seems unrelated, but you have to trust me when I say: as soon as your home becomes your office, your productivity is directly affected by how clean it is. Dust causes allergies, dirty dishes force you to go buy meals. Unfiled papers waste time when you are trying to work. You wouldn’t leave your desk at work cluttered with garbage and old files, don’t do the same to your home (this might change as you get more comfortable in your home-office; be wary)

4. Start Scheduling. Don’t write down anything other than work related tasks. You should keep a separate calendar if you feel the need to write down that you are headed to the doctor or want to exercise every Tuesday or Thursday morning. Your work schedule should be very simple. For example, here’s what mine looked like on a random day in June:

June 9, 2007

Elance Bidding
Email MySpace Contacts
Scan and Send Non-Disclosure Form
Triangle Direct Posts
Edit and Send off Mobile VoIP Article (need more details in introductions)
Need an Article x10
Brave New World Book Summary
Dating Site Edits (if they arrive)

My schedule might appear a touch over simplified, and you will slowly learn what works best for you. But, notice that nothing on that list is not a specific action related to a task. I didn’t include anything like “Lunch” or “Baseball Game”. Everything I did after work that day was written in a different schedule. It’s not that everything else isn’t important (or that I won’t forget at some point to go to the DMV) but I want a space in which I can easily look and see exactly what work I need to do for any given day.

As I complete each task, I will change the color in my Word document to red to mark that it has been completed. It’s a very simple process and I know other writers who go a few steps further and purchase Microsoft Project to keep track of everything for them, something I would almost consider myself if this didn’t work so well for me. Other writers still are able to remember what they are doing and don’t keep schedules.

However, my advice to you is this; always keep a record of your work for any given day. Even if you can remember, you probably won’t remember in 4 months if you need to look back and see which day you supposedly sent off Part 2 of a project that has gotten mixed up. Records are vital to keeping track of who owes you money, what you’ve completed and how productive you’ve managed to be.

5. Be Flexible. The final piece of advice I can offer in keeping organized is to remind you that as a freelance writer, you should always remain flexible. If a project doesn’t arrive on a certain day, just move it to the next day. If someone needs edits right away, squeeze them in. Two or three times a week I have to reorganize my schedule completely to fit in a project that needs to be finished or take on a new one that I promised to complete quickly.

As a new freelance writer, you are likely a few weeks or months away from keeping track of big projects in this manner, but trust me when I say that if you start now, you’ll thank yourself for it later. You will speed up just about everything by staying organized and eventually start branching out further. You’ll be amazed at the difference this stuff can make.