When your income depends on how productive you are, it’s easy to think of filing and related tasks as non-essentials. But if it gets bad enough, not being organized actually can hurt your productivity.

Today I’ve invited freelancer writer and frugal living expert Leah Ingram to share a guest post on getting organized. Her advice on cutting out clutter by updating office equipment comes from her new book, Toss Keep Sell! The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In, published recently by Adams Media. You can find out more about Leah on her website or her Suddenly Frugal blog.

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Does your home office have equipment overload? Mine used to.

If you’d popped into my home office last year, along with my Mac Book laptop, you would have found the following:

• Color inkjet printer
• Color inkjet printer, copier, and scanner
• Black-and-white laser printer
• Desktop copier
• Fax machine

Sounds like I was all set from a printing, copying, and scanning perspective, right? Well, yes and no. Sure, I had all the technology I needed to make color and black-and-white copies, to scan documents and photographs, send photos, and print out e-mails and manuscripts. But there were two reasons that this set up didn’t benefit me from an organizational and financial point of view; I spent:

• A lot of time switching back and forth between pieces of equipment, depending on the task I needed to complete
• A lot of money buying supplies for each printer, copier, fax machine, and all-in-one machine

Not only was having a lot of equipment sucking up my time, it was sucking up my money, too.

While a handful of the machines I was using came free with a past purchase of a computer, they were each expensive to maintain. Here’s a cost rundown of some of them:

Color inkjet printer and printer/scanner/copier: replacement cartridges cost about $35 each—a color cartridge and a black-and-white cartridge were necessary for both—and needed to be replaced every three months

• Copy machine: toner drum/cartridge cost $100 to replace. I needed to buy a new one every other year
• Laser printer: laser cartridge cost $80 to replace; it ran out of toner about once a year.

Oh, and did I mention that each of these machines took different print cartridges? That meant that I couldn’t stockpile any one kind of ink, printer, or toner cartridge when it was on sale (like I might groceries for my pantry) and then use it in all my machines. No, I had to buy them all separately.

Needless to say, in the course of the year, I was spending about $300 just to keep up my ink supply. Who wants to spend that kind of money, especially if this way of working isn’t time efficient? And then there’s the desktop clutter of having so many machines.

That’s why this past year I decided to streamline my office machines into one: I got a high-efficiency desktop printer that’s also a copier (color and black and white), scanner, and fax machine. I bought it on Black Friday and spent less for it than I did all of last year buying ink. Now if I need to replace ink, I only have to spend once but I still get the functionality of my four-in-one.

My plan this year is to sell those machines for extra cash, either on Craigslist or Gazelle.com If none of that works out, I’ll donate them to a non-profit and take the tax write-off—assuming my accountant says that’s kosher.

Copyright 2011 Leah Ingram. Reprinted with permission from Toss Keep Sell! The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In (Adams Media, 2010).

So for your reading enjoyment, here’s some WordCount Q&As I’ve done with writers on a variety of subjects. Happy reading.

Suddenly Frugal’s Leah Ingram – This prolific magazine writer, book author and frugal living blogger explains how she wrote her latest book in eight weeks.

One freelancer’s DIY book publishing success – Colorado-based corporate translator Corinne McKay explains how she self-published How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator and netted $12,000 in two years.

NewspaperDeathWatch.com’s Paul Gillin on online community news – New media pundit Gillin explains why small news ventures, in print and online, are fairing better than their larger counterparts.

One writer’s journey from print to online – Michelle Nicolosi got the online news bug back in the 1990s. Today she’s executive director of the now online-only SeattlePI.com.

Marketing your freelance business in bad times – Keven Malkewitz, a marketing expert and assistant business professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says in a down economy, cultivate existing clients, brush up on new skills and increase your marketing efforts.

If you’ve a freelancer with a unique take on the business, a successful blog or an online news venture, I’ve love to interview you for the WordCount Q&A. Contact me: michellerafter (at) comcast (dot) net.

Briefly describe your background as a freelance writer.
I have been a full-time, freelance writer since 1993. However, I started querying magazines when I was still in high school (about 10 years earlier), and knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a writer. I got a degree in journalism from NYU, then a job working on staff as a magazine editor, and quickly realized that I’d be happier and likely more successful if I was working for myself as a freelancer. I haven’t looked back since going out on my own some 16 years ago. Since going freelance I’ve published 13 books – soon to be 14- and written for many regional, national and custom magazines.

How did your book deal come about?
My agent Adam Chromy of Artists and Artisans pulled for me and promoted the heck out of me, and I continued to feed my Suddenly Frugal blog so that I had the platform and chops to prove that I could turn a blog into a book.

What role did your blog play in getting a book deal?
It was the whole reason for the book deal. I’d proven to Adams Media, my publisher, that I had a sustainable topic to write about, the media chops to promote the book and a built-in audience who would want to read the book. I get about 15,000 unique visitors a month at the blog. Wish it were 15,000 a day but I’m working on that.

How much of a head start did the blog give you in researching and writing the book? What material did you reuse?
I started the blog in May 2007. I got my book deal in January 2009. I’ve written, on average, five posts a week for the past 18 months. That meant I had plenty of material to get started. However, I did not reuse much from the blog. If all I was doing was cutting and pasting blog posts into a book, where’s the incentive to buy the book when readers could get my content for free on the blog? I did revisit a lot of the same topics I’d covered on the blog in new and different ways. For example, most of my blog postings are 400 to 600 words long. But the chapters were about 4,000 words long. So I was able to expand on many topics and bring in new information I hadn’t suggested in blog posts. Probably the only items I reused verbatim were a couple of my Suddenly Frugal Seal of Approval award winners, which I’d highlighted in the blog first.

You had 8 weeks after your book proposal was approved to turn in a finished manuscript. That’s amazingly fast. How did you do it?
Discipline, plain and simple. Truth is I’ve written books in six weeks before. I am a very fast writer and hard worker. Right before I got the book deal, I decided to write a young-adult novel. My goal was to bang out a 50,000 words before the month of January was over. To do so, I had to write 1,667 words every day. I ended up with a 58,000-word novel by the end of January.
I applied a similar word-count rule to writing Suddenly Frugal. My book was due to the publisher April 1, and my goal was to finish it by March 15 so I would have plenty of time to proof and edit it. I made all of my goals, including handing the book in on April 1. I just got word that the manuscript was officially accepted. The cover is now up on my blog and I made it my Twitter avatar for the time being.

You continued working on magazine stories while you wrote the book. How did you juggle both?
I have a very regimented work schedule that I adhere to. Though I tend to procrastinate at times like many writers do, I’m actually more productive when I’m juggling multiple assignments. Since I only have five to six hours a day to work – I work when my children are at school – I carve out specific periods of time during my work day and assign different tasks to them. If I’m working on a magazine article or three, plus the book, I’ll assign 30 or 60 minute slots of time devoted to a specific project. When that time is up, I move on to the next task in the time slot. I don’t always finish entire projects in a day, but I’m always making progress. I’ve used this time-block system since I was in college and was juggling a full course load, an internship and a part-time job.

You’re married and have kids. How did you work on a book and freelance work without sacrificing family time – or did you?
Here’s where that regimented work schedule helps me out. Also, I exercise every morning, right after my kids leave for school, and that is my “me” time. I’m up at 6:30, have time in the morning with my husband and two daughters before they all leave at 7:30, then by 7:45 I’m out the door to walk the dog. We walk for an hour, then it’s home to shower, get dressed and be at my desk by 9:30 or 10 . And it’s right to work, with time, of course, in between to email, go on Twitter, work on my blog, etc. In fact, I make working on my blog part of my regimented work day. Though I don’t get paid to write my blog posts, they have become an important part of my work portfolio. So those posts have a priority standing on my to-do list just like paying gigs do.

What advice do you have for other freelancers who’d like to write a book?
These days you really have to develop a specialty that gives you a solid platform. Also, you have to promote yourself constantly and get the media to pick up on what you’re doing so you have those kinds of clips to show publishers that you’re media worthy. If you aren’t already subscribing to HARO that’s a must. It’s thanks to HARO that my family and I ended up as the lead story in a BusinessWeek cover piece on the New Frugality, and I’ve also been able to promote my unique sense of frugality on TV, in newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Christian Science Monitor, and many other places as well. If you’re camera shy or don’t like being the subject of interviews, I’m not sure you can be a successful author.

Given how the economy’s changing traditional freelance markets, is this a good time to market book proposals and other types of work?
If you want to write a book and you don’t have a TV show, I don’t think that you can expect to get a big advance. My advance for Suddenly Frugal was the smallest I’d received for any of my 14 books but that’s OK – I’ve got a feeling that with this down economy, people are going to snap up a book on living more on less. I know publishers are buying fewer books these days so if you want your proposal to stand out, you’ve really got to find a topic that stands out. Originally, back in 2007, we were going to sell Suddenly Frugal with a green bent, because, you know, green is the new black. Although the mainstream media is just jumping on the green bandwagon now, back in 2007 publishers were telling my agent and me we’d totally missed the green gravy train. So we started back at square one, and then when the economy started to tank in mid-2008, we revamped the book proposal to be all frugal, all the time, and that worked for us.

Anything else you’d like to add?
I treat my freelance writing like a business. I know many other writers are amazed at my discipline and work structure. But if I were running any other kind of business that was perhaps more visible and not so virtual, I would be open for business and producing just as much as I am now with my words. I hate to be cliche but you know that old saying ‘Find something you love and you’ll never work another day in your life’? Well, I love what I do, and I can’t imagine doing anything else to earn a living – expect maybe hosting a TV show, I love being on camera. But the bottom line is this: I’ve worked my ass off to get where I am professionally. I do work every day, but that’s OK with me, because I truly love what I’m doing so sometimes it really doesn’t feel like work at all.