1. Don’t Check Your Email in the First Hour

If you are anything like me then when you have a difficult (urge to procrastinate) day, try not opening your email for the first hour, get writing instead. Most time management tips say you shouldn’t check your email more than two or three times a day and that needs to be scheduled in. I’ve found that on days when I open my email first thing, I spend too much time following interesting links that turn up in my Google Alerts – reminder to self, cut down on number of Google alerts. When I actually start writing first thing instead of checking email, I find that I get more done that day.

2. Don’t Turn on Twitter Before Midday

I have to admit that not turning on Twitter as soon as my laptop is fired up is a real hard one for me. I like to see what other tweeters are doing, and of course I have to follow up on any interesting links, especially those related to writing. I don’t think that I am alone in saying that many writers prefer to read about writing rather than getting on with it. Twitter is a great place to be, but I get a lot more done if I don’t log on until after midday.

3. Use Your Answering Machine

The family know I am at home working, and although I ask them not to call in the morning(my most productive time when not procrastinating) they often do. When I let the answer phone pick up any calls I can decide whether the call needs answering or whether it can wait a few hours, you’ll be surprised at the amount of time you save in this way. Deal with any non-urgent phone calls after lunch or if you have any time left after working on your projects, which brings me to my next tip.

4. Write in Elapsed Time Periods

This is a tip that I picked up from Willow over at the Freelance Writer. Take whatever number of projects you are currently working on and allot them a time period for the day e.g 2 articles for Mr. Smith, 1 hour, residual income articles 3 1hour and so on until you have the number of working hours you prefer. In order to make this work you need to implement the next tip.

5. Egg Timers Aren’t Just for Eggs

If you have allowed one hour for project number one then get yourself a downloadable egg timer and set it for an hour, if you finish writing in less than an hour, then you can do something else with the remaining minutes, Twitter perhaps? When I first saw this tip I thought it was a great idea, better than some of the software I had worked with in the past. The egg timer works just great for me because it tells you the difference between the amount of time you allow for a project each day, and the amount of time that elapses.

If you enjoyed these five tips, then how about responding with your own top five tips?

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Being Needed

It’s nice to be needed but not so much that you end up needled because you are not doing the things that you had planned. I have a method of operation on those four days where I work for an hour and take half an hour off for most of the day. If my RA is playing up then I may need to work an hour on and an hour off to rest my wrists and hands.

I find that social media sites such as Twitter can be seductive and you’re tempted to watch the stream and click interesting links, because they’ve got to be more interesting than the upteenth finance article. I try to keep my twittering for my off times but occasionally I break my own rule and then I sit up half the night trying to claw back the lost time.

Getting things done for a sixty something, arthritic freelancer with a large family and a dopy, possibly senile dog, is not a simple process as you might imagine, but somehow, I still manage to make a living.

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I ask this question of myself as much as anyone else because the last few months my workload has increased, good you might say, and my role as caring mother and grandmother has been much in demand. I have managed to increase my daily work output but when a sudden emergency occurs, and for some reason they occur often recently, it puts a spanner in the writing works. No matter how much I plot and plan my day, there is always at least one of my offspring, or offspring’s offspring, that needs my attention. I love being a mother and a grandmother but I love being a wife and a writer as well – so in the words of the song something’s gotta give, but what?

My list for today included ten articles for one client, one for another and four for a third and some amendments to an Ebook for a fourth. So far I have almost completed two of those tasks, in between giving my oldest grandaughter directions over the phone to her uncle’s office, and stopping for an unscheduled hour to chat with my eldest daughter. My only other work interferer has been too much time on Twitter today, I shall have to turn it off at some point this evening if I don’t want to still be up at 6am.

Any suggestions on how to successfully get a quart out of a freelance writer’s pint pot?

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Procrastination is the Thief of Time

Whenever you put things off or procrastinate you are losing time, time that could have been spent getting on with your writing, and maybe even having the time to finish that difficult chapter of your novel, or find the next line in a poem. Sometimes I find that I have to tell myself to stop, it’s writing time – usually this works, but there are times when it doesn’t. Part of the problem, at least for me, is that I take on too much and then feel suddenly overwhelmed by the huge volume of work. I’m a fast typist and my work is usually quite accurate so that a simple spell check usually does the trick. Yet I still put things off, even though I know that once I start I will enjoy what I am doing.

Managing Yourself

There’s a lot of talk about time management, but all that we can really manage is ourselves, time just is, it’s our attitude to ourselves and our own actions that is usually the problem. I know full well that I cannot hope to build a successful writing and research business unless I can manage myself and my bad habits. I do try to write everything down in my moleskin notebook/diary, but there are days when this goes by the board. When I don’t keep a schedule, I am much more likely to procrastinate because I haven’t broken down tasks to a manageable size.

When you try and tackle something head on as a whole project, it can seem like too much. You’re frightened fo failing and getting the job wrong, you’re scared that you won’t be up to it – and you won’t unless you take some time to break large tasks into smaller, more manageable little ones. The best way to manage yourself and stop procrastinating is to give yourself a break. Instead of beating yourself up about what you haven’t done, make sure that you have appropriate tasks that don’t overwhelm, then it is so much easier to get started.

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