Between the day off to honor the country’s laborers and reporting on Obama’s jobs plan, my week was all about work. My recommended reading for the week is all about work too:

Sequencing the startup DNA on LinkedIn (LinkedIn) – Startup stats based on analysis of tens of thousands of startup company founders’ LinkedIn profiles. Read the results to see if you have what it takes to start a business. Interestingly, LinkedIn found that the no. 2 industry connected to startup founders on its network was online publishing, behind venture capital and ahead of Internet and recruiting.

Knowing others struggle with self doubt (Depression Cookies) – Tia Bach riffs on my post from earlier this week about trusting your gut.

Bloggers don’t follow the script, to ConAgra’s chagrin (New York Times) – Bloggers take to the net after discovering the supposedly freshly prepared meal they’re fed at a publicity event is actually from the food conglomerate’s Marie Callendar’s frozen food line.

PR ethics concerns: pay for play journalism (EReleases) - A PR professional weighs in on why paying agencies when publications pick up stories on their clients is the wrong way to go.

News apps use Facebook profile information to create personalized data tools (Poynter)

Media companies have three ways to innovate, all with their own barriers (Poynter)

Why browsing is so important to content discovery (Mashable)

Revamping your brainstorming techniques (Inc.)

Only things didn’t exactly turn out that way.

Along with everything else I got on vacation, I got lice.

I won’t dwell on the particulars; suffice it to say the little buggers came from a family member.

Instead of spending the day letting clients know I was back in town and getting a jump on blog posts and a feature assignment due this week, I sat for hours in a chair at a hair salon that specializes in lice removal. And did laundry. Lots and lots of laundry.

It’s times like these that I have to remind myself that life doesn’t always follow a play list. Sometimes you have to go with the flow. The work will be there tomorrow. Editors are people too, they have cars that break down or God forbid, school-age kids that pick up lice from their classmates. If you have an emergency and need a little extra time, chances are they’ll understand.

In the end, you’re much better off dealing with life’s little hiccups right away instead of ignoring them because you have too much work to do and then watching them turn into much bigger problems. I learned that lesson recently too. I let my driver’s license expire when the renewal date fell during an especially hectic time this spring when I was running the blogathon, reporting a cover story, writing my usual two blog posts a week, and watching my son’s varsity baseball team compete in the league and state championship tournaments. It wasn’t until two months later after I tried picking up the rental car for a trip to the Bay Area and was refused for not having a valid license that I finally took the morning off to visit the DMV. Good thing San Jose has decent bus service.

At the risk of outing myself as a louse – both literally and figuratively – it’s worth sharing these less than flattering experiences if it helps the next overworked freelancer who finds him or herself in a similar situation. When you’re your own boss, it’s easy to let work run your life. Don’t.

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to put some more sheets in the dryer.

The individual musicians brought out the best in each other, making the whole of the performance greater than the sum of its parts.

It got me thinking about collaboration, and the effect it can have on freelancers’ work and careers.

It’s easy to mistake freelancing as a singular undertaking. But that’s not true. Writers work with editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, graphic designers, photographers and others. Write for enough publications, you could be dealing with several of each of those at the same time.

Who you collaborate with has an enormous bearing on the quality of your work. Team up with editors or publishers who’ve spent time at top-tier magazines, newspapers or websites and it can’t help but strengthen your work. Team up with inexperienced editors, and even though it might be easier, it could hurt you in the long run by not pushing you to up your game.

This is why I’ve frequently used this blog to warn writers not to work for content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content. Sure it’s easy money and it saves you from having to pitch. But who are you collaborating with? What kind of background and experience do they have? Will they help you become a better writer? Do they care about getting things right, or just good enough to be published?

If you think of the work you do as a series of collaborations, then you’re only as good as the people you collaborate with.

Besides pushing you to do your best work, there are other reasons to team up with the best collaborators you can find:

• There’s something to the old adage about two heads being better than one: working with someone else can help you see possibilities you might not have discovered on your own.
• You can get more done faster.
• Your work network expands to include not just the person or people you’re collaborating with, but their networks too (call it the LinkedIn effect).
• By pooling your talents, you make yourself more attractive to potential clients looking for an all-in-one solution, i.e., hiring a single team that can write and produce whitepapers, brochures or website content.
• Teaming up with someone younger, older, from a different culture or part of the country or world can help bring a new perspective to your writing.
• As we move to a more project-based economy, successfully teaming up with other people on an ongoing basis shows you’re adaptable and work well with others, which makes you a good catch.

What experiences with collaboration have you had?

Photo: Klearchos Kapoutsis/Flickr

Let other freelancers grouse, I love running a home-based business in the summer.

Here’s why:

1. I can wear shorts and flip flops to work without violating anybody’s dress  code.

2. I can soak up the sun while I each lunch on my back deck.

3. Everyone’s in a good mood, including editors.

4. The sun’s up when I start work and still up when I stop, even if I’ve worked a 10-hour day – a great mental boost.

5. No school-related distractions for three whole months.

6. I can shift my hours to start and end earlier to hit the local public pool with my 10 year old by late afternoon when it’s less crowded but still hot.

7. More people on vacation may mean more difficulty lining up interviews, but also fewer PR people sending me off-topic story pitches.

8. Speaking of vacation – I get one!

9. Vacations are great for recharging one’s mental batteries, which is great for boosting productivity. After Labor Day, I’m ready to dig in.

10. The dog days of summer when everyone else is out of town are perfect for doing blog maintenance, cleaning out files or starting a project you’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t had the time.

If you freelance, do you love summer or loathe it? 

Jennifer Willis

A number of years ago, when I was working full-time for a communications company and trying to make time to write a novel, Stephen Hawley Martin told me that if I got up an hour early every day to write a page of my story, in a year I’d have a first draft.

A year?

As much as I wanted to write fiction, who wants to spend an entire year working on a first draft — something that will then have to be rewritten a few times, edited, revised? And so I put off writing fiction.

It’s tough to carve time out of a busy, full-time work schedule to sit down and write fiction — it’s even worse when you’re already writing for a living, and the last thing you want to do is spend even more time in front of the computer stringing words together.

I imagine this was part of the impetus pushing Chris Baty and friends to invent National Novel Writing Month in 1999 — an insane effort to write a 50,000-word first draft in 30 days. In the twelve years since, NaNoWriMo has become an international event that takes place every November, challenging new and experienced writers around the world to write an average of 1,667 words each day. If you make it to the end, you have the first draft of a novel, ready to be picked apart for rewriting.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo every year since 2004, and it works for me. I like the competitive spirit, the cooperation and support found on the online forums, and the fact that I’m committed to a new fiction project. One of these manuscripts — my 2008 NaNoWriMo project — has recently been released as an ebook, with two more to follow this summer.

But what if you don’t want to wait until November to start your project? Or what if you can’t necessarily commit to writing every day — or nearly every day — for an entire month?

Don’t Do What I Did

First off, don’t do what I did when I wrote my first novel. Between 1999 and 2001, I wrote snippets here and there, sitting at airport gates waiting for my plane or late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t have a structure for my writing time, and I hadn’t given myself a hard deadline either. The process went on, and on, and on. Looking back, it seems a miracle that thing ever got finished.

Treat your fiction project like you would any writing assignment. Map out what needs to get done with an estimate of how long each step takes. What’s your target word count? Look at books or short stories in your genre to get a feel for how long your project should be. How many words can you write in an hour? What time can you block off — consistently — for writing, and what dedicated space can you use?

From there, set a challenging but realistic deadline — and find a way to hold yourself accountable. When you don’t have an editor breathing down your neck for your story that was due two days ago, motivation can be on the slim side. Setting up rewards for yourself — like a spa day — for meeting your deadline can be a great incentive, but sometimes you need more of a stick than a carrot. One trick Baty suggests is to make a check out to a friend for all the money you have, and post-date it for the day after your deadline. At the start of your project, give the check to your friend — with instructions to cash it if you miss the mark.

How to Create a Fiction Writing Schedule

For example, if you want to write a 7,500-word science fiction short story, and you write an average of 1,200 words per hour, you’re looking at 6.25 hours for your first draft. Also factor in research time, but don’t let yourself go overboard. One rule of thumb I’ve learned for first drafts of fiction is if you do a Google search and you can’t find what you’re looking for within three-to-five mouse clicks, leave a placeholder for the information and come back to it in the rewrite.

Let’s assume you want to spend 3.75 hours on research, giving us a nice round figure of 10 hours for your short story project. Now grab your calendar and figure out where those 10 hours are going to come from. If you’ve got every Wednesday night free — great! Block out two hours every Wednesday night for five weeks, and there’s your project time.

If you only make vague plans to “Do some writing this weekend” after all the errands are run, or wait to start writing until you “feel inspired,” you know you’re never going to do it, right?

Whatever time you can schedule, make it as consistent as you can, so you’ll get into a rhythm with your writing. And keep this time sacred, just as you wouldn’t let hell or high water keep you from a meeting with an editor from one of your dream markets. It’s way too easy to let life start to slide into your fiction time, but if you treat it like it’s any other work commitment, you’re more likely to get your project done on time.

In the end, regardless of special strategies and neat tips and tricks, it comes down to just making yourself do it. No matter how much you want to write your novel or short story, you’ll still likely find yourself procrastinating and coming up with every excuse in the book not to do it — which reminds me … when your writing time comes around, make sure you turn of the television or radio, close the door, or otherwise eliminate what is likely to distract you from your work. But just as Sting acknowledged that you have to treat songwriting as job and simply make yourself do it, the only way your fiction is going to get done is if you sit yourself down and write.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Leaving aside the question of what a woman writes – fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry, journalism or pithy blog posts – just how important is it to have a room of one’s own?

In researching the writing lives of 12 classic women authors for my new book, The Literary Ladies’ Guide to the Writing Life, I was struck by the universality of the issues and struggles the writers experienced. Finding quiet time to write and a modicum of privacy was as great a challenge for 19th-century women, especially those with children, as it is today.

Woolf wasn’t the first to want a private space to write. Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known for the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, neatly foreshadowed Woolf’s words in a letter she wrote to her husband. “If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room,” she said. Stowe had seven children (three of whom died, one as a toddler and the others in young adulthood). Although she was responsible for all household duties, she needed to augment the family’s income by writing anything she could get paid for (apparently, co-parenting was not widely practiced in the 19th century).

“All last winter I felt the need of some place were I could go and be quiet and satisfied,” Stowe wrote. Still, she felt guilty spending time apart from her children. “Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts … Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?” she wrote. Stowe’s husband offered little help with the home or children, but he encouraged his wife’s literary efforts, which paid off handsomely, not only in financial success, but with the seismic shift in public opinion on slavery caused by the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. From her letters, it is clear that when it came to privacy and quiet time, Stowe muddled though, snatching bits of tranquility as best she could.

You needn’t have a passel of kids to feel pressed for the time and privacy to write. L.M. Montgomery, best known for the Anne of Green Gables series, struggled with this issue even before having two sons. As a young working girl in 1910, she wrote in her journal, “I have had a hard time trying to arrange for enough spare minutes to do some writing.” At first, she wrote in the evenings, alone in her room after a day working at a newspaper. “Well, I tried it. I couldn’t string two marketable ideas together,” she wrote.

She tried writing before work, but found she “could not do good work in a chilly room on an empty stomach.” “Now it used to be at home that I thought undisturbed solitude was necessary that the fire of genius might burn. I must be alone and the room must be quiet,” she mused on her dilemma. “It would have been the last thing to enter my imagination that I could ever write anything at all, much less anything of value, in a newspaper office, with … people coming and going and conversing, telephones ringing and machines thumping and dragging overhead.”

The hubbub of the news office seemed most conducive to young Maud Montgomery, who snatched a bit of time here and there between calls and deadlines. “Every morning I write and not bad stuff either,” she wrote.

Who can’t relate to Montgomery’s longing for “enough spare minutes to do some writing,” especially if it’s writing that isn’t compelled to be finished by some real-world deadline? And along with those spare minutes, some sweet solitude.

But let’s rethink the latter. Might finding the time and place to write be easier if total solitude isn’t necessarily the ideal to aspire to? What if, like in Montgomery’s case, a bit of hubbub is more conducive to getting work done?

Now that my kids are grown and I can actually attain that perfect, rapt silence I so longed for once upon a time, ironically, I find I get more work done – and enjoy it more – when I work with my writing partner, a novelist. We work together in a café with just the right amount of background noise and just enough strong coffee. We keep each other focused, and the din precludes the isolated sense of being completely in your own head when alone in “a room of one’s own.” This might be why co-working spaces for writers and specially designated spaces in public libraries are proliferating. In these places, writers come not to discuss work, but actually do work, in grown-up version of parallel play.

Whether in sequestered silence, working in a café or library, with writing friends or scribbling strangers, each of us needs to experiment, like Maud Montgomery did, to find the space that is the best and most efficient for helping the words flow.

Join us tomorrow, March 30, for the next WordCount Last Wednesday live chat, when my guest is Marla Beck, a Marin County, California, life coach for writers.

Beck specializes in helping writers get the most out of their work, and their life. In the chat she’ll discuss:

• Signs your work and life are out of whack
• How to synch what you do for work and fun
• Obstacles that stand in the way of achieving better work/life balance
• Integrating “dream” projects into your daily work life

She’ll also answer questions about getting more out of your work and life.

Please join us March 30, at 10 a.m. PST. On Twitter, use the hashtag #wclw. We’ll start off with some introductions, I’ll ask Beck some questions and we’ll leave plenty of time for questions from participants.

See you then!

Many weeks, my answer to that question would be a resounding “No.” I work too much and sleep too little. I can’t escape the constant feeling of being behind. I work, shuttle my youngest to school and activities, make dinner for him and the rest of the family, do laundry, pick up the house and am lucky to squeeze in a couple workouts a week.

On top of all of that, I wonder whether the work I am pursing so vigorously matches my long-term goals. And just what are my long-term goals?

Marla Beck, life coach for writers

That’s why my guest  for the March 30 WordCount Last Wednesday live chat is Marla Beck, a Marin County, California, life coach for writers.

Beck, who I interviewed a year ago in this post, specializing in helping writers get the most out of their work, and their life.

In the chat, Beck will discuss subjects including:

• Signs your work and life are out of whack
• How to synch what you do for work and fun
• Obstacles that stand in the way of achieving better work/life balance
• Integrating “dream” projects into your daily work life

During the chat, Beck will also answer any of your questions about getting more out of your work and life.

Please join us on Wednesday, March 30, at 10 a.m. PST. On Twitter, use the hashtag #wclw. We’ll start off with some introductions, I’ll ask Beck some questions and we’ll leave plenty of time for questions from participants.

Although it’s possible to use the standard Twitter interface for a live chat, you might find it easier to follow along with an add-on application such as TweetGrid, TweetChat or HootSuite. Of those three, my favorite is TweetChat. This tutorial explains how to set them up.

If you’re afraid you’ll offend your Twitter followers by tweeting too much during a chat, you can suggest they use an app called TwitterSnooze to temporarily turn off your tweets. Right before the chat starts, tweet a message like: “I’ll be in a live chat for the next hour; if you don’t want to follow, turn off my tweets with TwitterSnooze.com.”

Planning for 2011: I’m planning the last half of the 2011 WordCount Last Wednesday chats, so if you’ve got an idea for a subject you’d like to see covered, send it my way. If you’re an expert in a particular aspect of freelance writing, running a freelance business or tech tools for writers and are interested in participating in a WordCount Last Wednesday chat as a guest speaker, please contact me.

If you’re a one-person shop, you’re responsible for marketing and sales (pitches and contract negotiations), creative (research, reporting, writing, editing), billing (sending invoices), collections and promotions (Twitter, Facebook et al).

Not only is it difficult to figure  out how to divide your time to cover all those aspects of running a business, you also have to resist giving into to a myriad of potential distractions – after all, you can’t exactly turn off email and Twitter if you use both for work, right?

During the Feb. 23 WordCount Last Wednesday live chat we used the hour to talk about time management for writers. Close to a dozen freelancers shared their biggest frustrations and the steps they take to stay organized and productive. They also shared tech tools they use to keep on top of work.

In this recap, I’ve included the very best parts of the chat, which I’ve structured in Q&A form:

What are writers’ biggest time management struggles?

Writers’  obstacles to using time more effectively fall into these categories:

• Balance – Meeting current deadlines and marketing to existing and new clients to keep work coming in.
• Focus – Switching from task to task or project to project without getting distracted.
• Expectations – Creating realistic expectations for how much can be accomplished in an an hour, day, week or month – so you don’t take on too much and feel overloaded or too little and not be able to pay the bills. “I yo-yo between saying yes too much or too little,” says Boston freelancer Susan Johnston. “Things fall through so sometimes I end up with the right workload.”
• Flexibility – Staying loose enough to deal with the unforeseen circumstances that inevitably crop up while maintaining enough structure to finish projects on deadline. “Someone asked, ‘What’s your typical day like?’ San Diego freelancer Louise Julig says. “I said, ‘What’s a typical day?’”
• Multitasking – Working on multiple projects simultaneously, a normal part of a freelancer’s life.

What strategies do writers use to stay productive?

Writers say they use a wide range of strategies to stay productive. Here are some suggestions they made during the chat:

1. Turn off distractions. Disconnect the phone. Don’t check email. Turn off the Internet. Don’t answer the doorbell. If you absolutely must stay online, close all but one tab on your browser.

2. Use a timer. Set an egg timer or an online timer for 30 minutes or another specific period of time and don’t do anything but write. Give yourself a short break, then set it again, and again until you finished what you’re doing.

3. Use a goal buddy. Some freelancers team up with a writing partner they check in with on a regular basis to keep them accountable for how they’re using their time. Some writing buddies check in with each other every hour, others once a day, once a week or once a quarter.

4. Set goals. Laura Vanderkam, a New York freelance writer and author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, says she writes out big priorities for week. It’s a short list, “but they have to all get done. Schedule ‘em in. Leave floater days open for flotsam,” she says.

5. Reward yourself. Many writers say they set daily or weekly goals and reward themselves for finishing tasks or meeting deadlines. Rewards don’t have to be big – a walk with the dog, an afternoon nap, coffee with a friend, a glass of wine. The point is to treat yourself for getting the job done. Other writers say the only reward they need is the one that counts the most – the paycheck that comes after they’ve filed a story.

6. Break your day up into chunks. “I try to block out my time and schedule 1-2 hours dedicated to each project, and not do work for anything else during that time,” says Denver freelancer Nicole Relyea. “I use a whiteboard that has sections for each day of the week,” says Portland freelancer Jennifer Willis. “I map out my daily activities for the week, and try to stick to it.”

7. Follow a formal productivity regime. Some writers swear by productivity regimes such as David Allen’s Getting Things Done, The Artist’s Way or Tim Ferris’ The Four-Hour Work Week. Others say they’re turned off, especially by Ferris, who suggests only checking email twice a day. “I felt like it was based on a faulty premise. Some emails DO require immediate answers,” Johnston says.

8. Use a to-do lists. Some writers swear by to-do lists (including me), and are hooked on the immense satisfaction that comes with crossing things off the list once they’re finished. “I stick with a to-do list that I accomplish in any order. I’m not restricted and feel accomplished at the end of the day,” says Florida writer Sakura Chica.

9. Work when nobody else is. Some writers get up early (me again) or work late, so they can write without interruption.

10. Work when you’re “on.” Use the time of day when you have the most energy to tackle the hardest tasks on your to-do list.

11. Tackle the hardest stuff first. Pick the one thing you’re dreading and do it first – getting it out of the way can be enough of a psychological boost to carry you through the rest of the day.

12. Hire help. Use a virtual assistant to take care of administrative tasks, or off load non-work chores such as housecleaning, yard maintenance, grocery shopping to carve out more time for work. “I hired a virtual assistant to handle some of my administrative tasks, freeing me up for big picture thinking,” Johnston says. “She proofreads, researches, formats guest blog posts, searches for images on Flickr, etc.”

Next up: tech tools for time management - In my next post, I’ll recap the different software programs, browser apps and other tech tools that writers use to manage their time.

You can see the entire transcript of the Feb. 23 WordCount Last Wednesday chat here, or look for it on Twitter by using the hashtag #wclw. For another take on the chat, read writer Amara Levine-Reich’s recap, The Wisdom of the Twitter-sphere.

What tips can you share for better managing your time? Please share by leaving a comment.

I’ve been feeling like that as I wrap up some assignments I’ve had on the books for a while, take on a gigantic new one, and at the same time, juggle a stream of requests to do presentations, take part in panel discussions or give interviews.

It would be easy to turn down the latter because it’s not all paid work. But I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year immersing myself in all things social media and talking about the future of journalism, so I don’t want to pass up those opportunities just when my marketing efforts are starting to pay off.

So how do I prioritize what’s becoming a longer and crazier work week?

It’s not just me. As the economy picks up more freelancers are getting offers of new projects, and after what the recession did to our business this year, nobody has the heart to say no to work. So we’re all in the same busy boat.

Some writers set a timer and concentrate on one thing until it goes off. Others segment every day into specific parts devoted to different tasks. Freelance writer, author and blogger Leah Ingram is the master of this. Even if you read the Q&A I did with her some months back, it’s worth taking a second look just to see again how she’s able to produce magazine articles, books and a busy blog with aplomb.

I was thinking about all this when I walked into Starbucks recently. I was browsing through the store’s bookshelf waiting for my hot spiced cider when I saw a guide to getting accepted into the Air Force Academy. My high school-aged son is interested in the Air Force Academy, so when my drink arrived I sat down and started reading.

A few chapters in there was a section on what first year cadets can expect – lots of classes, little free time. In fact, according to the guidebook, first years are given too much to do on purpose, so they learn to figure out what’s most important. The thinking is that when they’re in combat situations they’ll always have too much to do and will have to be able to prioritize in an instant.

I couldn’t help draw parallels to how freelance writers and other self-employed people operate. We always have too much to do. The trick is to figure out which things demand your attention right now and do those first.

That’s sometimes easier said than done, especially when you have conflicting high priority tasks.

Lately I’ve put all my work and non-work to-dos into one big weekly list and picked off the stuff that’s feels most important first and let the rest sit there. Some things roll over week to week because they’re not that critical. I almost always have 10 to 15 low-priority items waiting to get taken care of (we will replace the ugly green couch in the family room some day, right after I file the piles of papers sitting in my office and hang the pictures we took down when we painted last February). When it’s the end of the day or a weekend and I’ve finished a big project but still have work time to burn, I try to knock a few off the list.

I’m also a firm believer in outsourcing household or work-related tasks to clear the decks for work. I use a travel agent to book business trips. I pay for house cleaners, a yard crew and to have groceries delivered.  I minimize routine chores by grouping them together once a day or once a week.

Still, there are times when even the best time-saving tricks aren’t enough.

So I’m asking: if your schedule’s gotten busier, how do you handle it? How do you prioritize?