Freelance Writing – Are You Wasting Your Time?

We are all probably guilty of wasting some of our freelance writing time each day and this really isn’t good for your career.  How much time do you think you waste each day?  When you sit down to start your freelance work what is the first thing you do?

Many of us check our emails first thing and this can be a big mistake.  You could have 100 emails sitting in your inbox and no matter how quickly you go through them you are still going to waste at least 10 minutes or more of your time.  The best advise is to set a specific time for checking and replying to emails.  If you put aside 30 minutes in the morning to go through emails that should be it.  Don’t leave your email window open on your computer as it only serves as a distraction.  Everytime that little “you’ve got mail” popup appears you will be tempted to go and check what it is.  If you are in the middle of typing an article this could be detremental because when you come back to your article you have to get back into it all over again.  Your train of thought will be lost.

Another time waster and one that really can lose you valuable freelance work time has to be Twitter.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter but I don’t spend all day on it.  I set a specific amount of time each day to network on Twitter.  If you use Twitter and you use an application such as TweetDeck then make sure you don’t have it open when you are doing your freelance work.  It is all too easy to get side tracked with Twitter and before you know it an hour has passed and that article that you were working on is still just two sentences long.

Another obvious distraction from your freelance writing work is an open web browser.  If you have research to do for an article make sure you have this completed before you start writing your article.  An open browser is an invitiation for distraction.

If you want to ensure that you don’t waste your freelance writing time I suggest that you start off by making a list.  Set yourself a time frame for each item on your list and stick to it.  If you have 5 articles on your list and you have completed your research then the only application that you should have open on your computer is the word processor that you use.  If you have blog posts to complete all you need open again is your word processor application until you are ready to publish your post.

Set yourself a daily schedule.  Maybe you will work on client projects for an hour, then network and market your freelance business for an hour.  Be sure to set a realistic schedule for yourself because all work and no play will make your day extremely boring.  You need to find out what works best for you but if you really want to stop yourself from being distracted then you need to make sure the only programs that you have open are the ones you need to work with.

Until next time,

Keep Writing

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