I was sick the entire weekend which is what has sparked this post. I have vertigo which meant that I spend my entire weekend lying on the couch. This of course had an impact on my freelance writing work because I wasn’t able to do anything. It was hard enough to keep my eyes focused let alone look at the laptop. I have a client that I work with an my job involves posting on three different blogs on a daily basis. One of these blogs has two posts per day so even at the weekend I have some work to do. I had no choice this weekend but to inform my client that I was ill and lucky for me she said that I could post all the blogs when I was feeling up to it and just back date them.
Today as you can imagine was quite a hectic day for me because instead of four blog posts to complete I had twelve. It got me thinking though….what do freelance writers do when they are ill?
When I worked in a 9 – 5 job it didn’t matter if I was ill because someone else would cover my job and complete my work for the days I was absent. Not with freelancing though. Do you have an illness plan? What do you do when you are sick?
With a lot of freelance writing work there is a timeline so if you are ill for one or two days you can normally make the work back up. What if you fall ill when you deadline is approaching though?
Being ill really did get me thinking and I have made a plan. Now each week I write a detailed account in my work journal of the work I have for the coming week. I put the clients name and email details along with the scope of their project. Each day I update the journal entry and detail what I have completed, what is left and anything I have forwarded to this client. This way if I do happen to become ill again I can get my husband to look in the journal and email the client if needs be. I have also explained the work folder on my laptop to him so that if he needs to locate anything he will know where to find it. This should hopefully work well for me.
I guess we never know when illness will strike. If it was a case where you had to be hospitalised for a number of days would you be able to cope? Do you have a backup plan?
I would love to know what everyone else does when they are ill so please share your tips and advice so we can all create the perfect illness plan.
Until next time,
Keep writing
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Wow, This is a legit problem. You know, the same principles apply in terms of life getting in the way of writing which I’ve been in the position of having to deal with recently.
The lesson I’ve learned is to try and get as many posts written in advance as possible. Even then it’s kind of a crap shoot. I have decided to put real effort into batch writing of posts while I have the spare time. This is a big change for how I usually write so it’s been a challenge.
George
George,
I can really relate as you have probably noticed on this blog too. Life and work do get in the way and it can be hard to keep a blog up to date and posted on regularly. I like your idea of batch writing of posts and this is something that I should try to do also.
Amanda
(…) even though unrelated to my site, still ghostwritinguncovered.com is other useful source of information on this topic(…)
Amanda
This is a very real problem indeed and I have been caught out more than once. I generally do feature articles and human interest stories, so whenever I am low on work I create articles on random topics which might be of interest in the future and store them in a folder. So if push comes to shove and I really cant create a fresh piece I dig into my own writes and rehash them as per the clients requirements and send off. Ofcourse, i dont always have just the right stuff and then its back to pleading for more time.
I wonder what others do.
shoma