What are your biggest challenges?
July 28, 2007 by Deb Ng
Filed under Freelance Writing
This is my dream job. I have great clients, I can work off my back deck and I don’t have to commute to an office any more. Like any job however, there are challenges. Time management is a big one, especially now that there’s no school. We do have camp a few mornings a week, but that ends this week, so it’ll only get worse until the first week of September. Time management isn’t my biggest challenge, however.
Then there’s the working at home thing. People seem to expect more of you when you’re home based. If I worked in an office all day, no one would expect me to always handle the laundry, clean out the litter box, make dinner, take out the trash and all the fun “house stuff”, yet my family has become more dependent on me to do these things since I began working at home. Don’t get me wrong, they help out, just not as much. As irritating as that is, it’s not my biggest challenge.
Deadlines crop up all the time. Not the way they did when I was writing content or copy for a business, but I do have to provide certain places with a certain amount of blog posts each day. As you can imagine, when one works for so many agencies, plus maintains one’s own blogs, keeping track or prioritizing can be a challenge. It’s not my biggest challenge either.
The Internet is a huge distraction. So is my pool. So is the television, the refrigerator, the phone, my friends and the mailman. It’s way easier to procrastinate at home than in an outside job, let me tell you. Now that summer’s hear I find myself working late into the evening to meet all my commitments. Procrastination and distractions aren’t my biggest challenge.
My biggest challenge is email. I get lots and lots of email. I have several blogs and each of them generates email. This blog along sometimes can yield hundreds of emails a week. I don’t mind, mind you, but it’s difficult to keep track. I try to sort everything in folders to answer in order of importance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get to it any sooner.
So tell me about you. What are your biggest challenges?
Hi! I’m in exactly the same position as you. I started freelance writing a few months ago, and before I knew it I was working from 7 in the morning till midnight, six days a week! Since then I’ve toned it down a bit and managed to get my time management a bit more under control. On Monday I go back to University, and I really don’t want to know how that’s going to work.
I also have a blog, similar to yours, that focuses on how people can get started writing, and all of the random info they need to find work, set up online payment facilities and write the type of writing that generates the most income.
That’s at http://writenonsense.blogspot.com
All of the above! I’d have to say, though, that keeping up with the housework and errands is the worst for me; there’s always *something* that needs to be done, and I don’t even have kids yet (just a fiancé that lives with me and my dog).
Also, along those lines, convincing people to cut out the personal calls (phone and in person) during my business hours can be tough; this is most difficult to get my fiancé’s Italian family to get–especially now that so many are here visiting for a month of vacation.
Speaking of which, there’s another difficulty. Italy shuts down in August, but unfortunately I can’t, and it gets tiring to try to convince people that I have to work and can’t hang out at the beach everyday, stay out late every night, blah blah blah. Poor me, I know
That’s one of my difficulties, too – making people (mom, sister, friends) aware that I am actually working and don’t really have time to chit-chat. How many times do you have to say it?
But the Internet is my biggest challenge. Even now, with intentions to clean the house and get ready for a press trip I’m going on, I’m here. Trolling for jobs has become procrastination from the actual work that I do have and the clients I need to nurture.
Oh, and then there’s Facebook……
Saying “no” is my biggest challenge. Like Deb said, people seem to expect more out of you when you are home. I don’t have kids, so I am lucky in that regard, but friends and family members seem to pop out of the woodwork regularly with requests for favors. I’ve had golden retrievers and Pekingese puppies at my house all day, taken a friend’s cat to the vet because the vet closes before she gets out of work, taken care of a four month old, chauffeured a 24 year-old who refuses to drive anywhere around town (don’t ask), and watched a bird for a week while a friend was on vacation (more like HEARD the bird than watched it).
I have a very hard time saying no, and as a result, I find myself working on weekends and working until 3 a.m. to stay on track with my own projects and housework.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. It does seem that people assume that since you’re at home, you don’t have anything to do. It’s amazing how little other people understand time constraints involved in writing.
My kids. And MySpace. No really, it is my children. They adore me. They want me 24/7. Its enough to develop a narcissm issue
Making myself stop working is my greatest challenge. It is not that clients impose this on me; I do it to myself. Part of it is that it’s my business now, not some big bad boss’s agenda, so not only do I enjoy it all, but I feel an extra sense of responsibility in everything I do.
I recently read Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles, and he suggests marking off days on your calendar as free days, focus days and buffer days. I have been trying to do this and it’s helped a little. When you have a free day, which he suggests once a week + vacations (which I always end up working on as well), you don’t check e-mail, or clean your house, or anything other than do the things you enjoy. Buffer days are days that involve doing the things you have to do to free yourself up to be more productive. Focus days are days when you focus completely on your passion, in this case, freelance writing and working on projects that will take me where I want to go.
Since I decided to take the plunge into freelance writing, I would say my biggest challenge is generating income in between projects. I started http://www.analogstix.com to generate income through ad impressions, but that’s still in the early stages of attracting visitors and not yielding a whole lot of income.
Also video game blogging is a very niche market, but blogging in itself has become saturated, so another challenge is making myself stand out to become more attractive to potential clients.
My biggest challenge is definitely the Internet. I can sit down to work and suddenly an entire hour has gone by.
If I’m honest about it, the problem really is self discipline. Not the Internet.
TOP TEN (in random order):
1. self-discipline
2. my three-year-old
3. facebook
4. people phoning me (call display is great: i’m starting to only answer if it’s my husband calling from work–he can only talk for about two minutes!)
5. hunting for more freelance writing jobs
6. daydreaming
7. my pregnancy (i’d rather sleep than work)
8. inability to drag my butt out of bed in the morning
9. web surfing
10. no real “office” for working
Biggest challenge is probably also my biggest character flaw: laziness. The Internet and email also constantly distract me. I’d never get any fiction writing done if it wasn’t for my AlphaSmart.
Now that I am starting to see some fruits of my labor – getting some jobs – I realize that I must stop procrastinating and establish some sort of schedule. I am also guilty of allowing excessive email checks and the wonders of the internet to distract me.
The internet is one of my biggest challenges. I am too easily distracted. For example, I was writing a set of articles recently on craft projects that use men’s ties. In the first hour, I did about ten minutes of research, twenty minutes of planning my own tie projects (which I have never even dreamed of doing until now), fifteen minutes of looking for baby quilt patterns (for me, not the article), and another fifteen minutes of shopping for purses made out of men’s ties online.
That kind of thing happens more often than I would like to admit…
Email is another challenge, as I have a tendency to stop whatever I am doing in order to spend 20 minutes answering an email as soon as it comes in.
Possibly my biggest challenge, though, is my husband. I am not always done with my work when he gets home, and I find it next to impossible to work when he is around. So my good intentions of working overtime to finish a project almost always blow up in my face.
Lately my biggest challenge has been lack of air conditioning!! Seriously, I’m finding being in a hot house drains my energy faster than I would have guesssed. By the time noon rolls around, I want nothing to do with this hot laptop and whatever is contained on it.
I’ve got a set schedule I work from — but some days that’s more restricting than helpful. Working/writing from home has to be flexible. If an email comes in that needs attention I need to drop what I’m doing and deal with it — not work it into a schedule.