Losing work as a freelancer

Been there.

Within the last couple of months, I’ve had two steady, decent-paying jobs fall through. One was a regular copywriting gig for a medium-sized company; the other was with a well-established news site. Together, these projects were netting close to $2,000 per month. When they came to a grinding halt, I was left scrambling to make up the difference.

Overcoming this hurdle got me thinking about the steps I wish I’d taken to prevent the panic that comes with unexpectedly losing work.

3 Things I Learned from Unexpectedly Losing a Gig | The Freelancer – Marianne Hayes, Contently (19 December 2014)

Read the full piece.

Don’t plan ahead

Posted by William Gallagher

On the one hand, this feels related to the idea that you shouldn’t make resolutions. But it also reminds me of a poster I used to see on the London Underground. It was an ad for something ostensibly philosophical but actually was more a promo for a religious thing. It went on and on about how we repeat our dreadful days over and over, we keep doing the same things again and again, and we needed this course of philosophy to make us do new things.

The last line said “Classes every Monday and Thursday”.

Anyway Steven Farquharson from a a blog called 2HelpfulGuys has this to say about planning:

When you are looking too far forward into the future the uncertainty can seem daunting.

But every marathon is finished step by step, every wall is built brick by brick and every life is lived day by day.

If you live your life trying to get as much out of each individual day as possible, you can rest assured that you have done all you can to achieve a life that makes you proud.

You have to design your days to design your life.

Design Your Days to Design Your Life – Steven Farquharson, 2HelpfulGuys (19 October 2014)

Read the full piece where you’ll see the final section says “As usual, I’ll see you next Sunday.”

Plan tomorrow’s first thing now

Posted by William Gallagher

Like laying out tomorrow’s clothes last thing at night – which I still never remember to do – make a short note about the first thing you’ve got to do. Well, the first thing after breakfast and all that. The first thing that needs to be done when you get to your desk.

Then do it. Get to that desk, do that thing. Do it before you check emails, do it before you look at the rest of the day.

Don’t write a very big note but do write exactly enough so that when you sit down and read that scribble, you can immediately begin the work.

This does a lot for you. It starts you off well, it means you’ve got something important done right off the bat, it means you’re deep into your day before you’ve properly woken up. And it also keeps you away from your email which is a brilliant tool but also a very destructive one.

Tell me about it

Posted by William Gallagher

I spent the day hours behind and carrying a ferocious headache because I entirely cocked up my sleep last night.

Coffee, late night email and the snooze button sap people of energy, compromising an employee’s overall performance at work. Though these things seem innocent, an evening cup of Joe, one quick reply to a colleague and an extra 15 minutes of shut-eye in the morning can drastically diminish the quality of one’s sleep.

9 Sleeping Habits to Enhance Your Productivity

Read the full piece for things we can do.

Future You

Posted by William Gallagher

I got this idea from a woman I’m mentoring in all this creative productivity. That’s a thing now: I do The Blank Screen sessions one to one and it is the most hair-raising fun I’ve had since writing the original book. There are so many great things about getting in so deep with an individual and their work and one of them is that I learn things back.

Such as Future You.

It’s just this:

Do it now so that Future You doesn’t have to.

And maybe:

Do it now so that Future You loves you – or at least thinks you’re okay

My mentoree (is that a word?) says she uses it for simple things like making the beds in the morning rather than leaving it until she gets back from work. She uses it in her work, getting things done while they’re fresh so that her Future You isn’t stressed out with a deadline.

She also says she falls down a bit on that last one.

But the idea is simple and sound and I’m using it right now. I haven’t got a lot on today but they are important to me. And they’re occupying more time than they should: they are events of a certain quite short duration yet the time I’m spending planning and churning and rehearsing means I will lose the whole day to them. Which is fine and even very good, but I wanted to write to you. So right now, rather than holding my head and clutching a hot mug of tea, hello. Future Me will be pleased I did this now because Future Me would be very narked if I missed a chance to chat.

In a mo, I’m off to a school for the last of four sessions about scriptwriting. I was up for hours last night worrying about this, about what we have left to do, what they can get done, what we can make together. And then around 5am – no, wait, I get up at 5am, it was exactly 5am – I went from my bed to my Mac to write down all I needed for the morning.

I wrote that naked at 5am and have you seen how cold it is out there? I was shaking by the time I’d finished. But Future Me then got to stand in a hot shower and let the worries and the plans soak away.

To be replaced by nerves about tonight. For tonight I’m performing at the launch of an anthology of short stories. It was my first commissioned prose fiction and so far it has gone down stormwards. Tonight’s the big presentation, though. It will be the 120th time I’ve presented or spoken or done something with an audience since I moved back to Birmingham two years ago. But it’s a worry.

Future Me is currently discussing with Present Me why in the world Past Me invited my family.

Busy doing nothing – official

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s possible that you cannot clear any time in your day to do nothing. It’s entirely possible. But Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, says he does precisely this and that it is a boon for him.

If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect “buffers,” or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings.

In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day (broken down into 30- to 90-minute blocks). It’s a system I developed over the last several years in response to a schedule that was becoming so jammed with back-to-back meetings that I had little time left to process what was going on around me or just think.

At first, these buffers felt like indulgences. I could have been using the time to catch up on meetings I had pushed out or said “no” to. But over time I realized not only were these breaks important, they were absolutely necessary in order for me to do my job.

The Importance of Scheduling Nothing – Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn blog (3 April 2013

Read the full piece for the details of why he does this and exactly how it has helped.

Hat tip to the Sydney Morning Herald for mentioning this today.

Relax, you’re not that busy

Posted by William Gallagher

Stop thinking of relaxing as a ticket to laziness and build free time into your day. Relaxation relieves stress, lets you enjoy the moment and improves your problem-solving skills. So take naps. Breathe. Meditate. If you’re always rushing, develop a morning routine to set a calmer tone for the rest of the day. Don’t be so busy you’re not enjoying the precious little time you have on this earth.

How to Stop Being Busy – Sasha Graffagna, SuperheroYou (2 June 2014)

Read the full piece for more interesting and sobering, even correctly chastising thoughts.

You’re your own boss

Posted by William Gallagher

When I went freelance in the 1990s, very many people enthused at me about what it would like not being a boss. I knew they were wrong: it was more like I was taking on 17 bosses, each of them paying me a tiny bit.

All these years on, though, they were right. And I was wrong. (Would you look at that? A man saying he was wrong. Songs will be sung of this day.)

I have all these clients, all these editors, most people have just the one boss. But we are all working for ourselves and as easy as it can be to let the boss decide everything, as even easier as it is to just complain about that man or woman, you will be more productive and you will feel better when you realise that you are in charge.

Let’s not get silly about it. Punching your boss in the face is not empowerment, it’s unemployment and a possible legal case. But take everything your job requires you to do and look at it all is if you are the manager. Which bit does your client, your boss, really need? What bits are quick wins you can knock out in ten minutes? What’s the stuff that you know is just bollocks and busy work? And what is the stuff that you can do that needs help from other people? Best yet: what’s missing? What more can you do that will be really good for you, your boss, your company and your future pay rises?

Look at your job not as what you have to do or as who you are, but instead as this business that you are running. You have clients and customers, you have resources, if you use them like that instead of constantly reacting to whatever happens next or whoever demands things the loudest, you’ll feel in control. It’s the best feeling because it’s real, you’ll feel in control because you are.

Mind you, keep doing that and you could end up being promoted to boss. Or go freelance.

Don’t look at what you’ve got to do, look at what you’ve got

Posted by William Gallagher

This is really interesting. It’s crouched behind whatever the opposite of a come-on title is – it’s called The Power of Asset-Based Approaches – but it is fascinating. The core of it, or at least the core that immediately appeals to me, is that taking stock of what and who you’ve got produces better results than you all bitching about what problems you have to solve.

Do you know, when you put it that way…

Writer Donnie Maclurcan puts it differently:

The underlying message is that when we start by exploring people’s strengths, we value people as human beings. When applied to community development, the asset-based approach is one of the most powerful ways to mobilize for social change because it proposes that everyone has something to offer and therefore everyone is needed. It shifts thinking to building from opportunities rather than responding to problems, and in the case of group processes it reduces the kinds of participant fears that often lead to unhealthy behaviours (such as power plays and passive aggressive behaviour). Equipped with such knowledge, groups can then move forward in a respectful, highly productive way with the work that attracted their member’s involvement in the first place.

The asset-based principle is also transferable to project planning. When you design a project that starts by highlighting its participants’ strengths, user uptake rapidly increases. Similarly, an article that starts with positives or neutral facts will draw-in and retain more readers than one that starts with a controversial opening statement, even if that controversial statement appears later on in the article. Highlighting this phenomenon in the real world, the U.K. sustainability communications agency Futerra compiled a 2009 report demonstrating just how important it is for climate organizations to begin their arguments and reports by ‘selling the sizzle’, i.e., focusing on what’s going well.

The Power of Asset-based Approaches – Donnie Maclurcan, Post Growth Institute (9 September 2014)

Read the full piece, I recommend it. And thanks to Angela Gallagher for the heads up.

Tidy up before you clean up

Posted by William Gallagher

Before beginning her career as a successful author and speaker, Patsy Clairmont did something unexpected. She washed the dishes.

She wanted to take her message to the world, but as she was readying herself, she felt nudged to start in an unusual way. She got out of bed and cleaned her house.

In other words, Patsy got rid of the mess. And it put her in a position to start living more creatively. We must do the same.

Bringing your message to the world does not begin on the main stage. It starts at home. In the kitchen. At your desk. On your cluttered computer. You need to clear your life of distractions, not perfectly, but enough so that there’s room for you to create.

Clutter is Killing Your Creativity (And What to Do About It) – Jeff Goins, Goins, Writer (undated, probably 14 October 2014

Read the full piece.