Last year, I made business trips to Orlando, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. And the year before that I traveled about the same amount.

In my 20s while I was still single, I traveled a lot for work. Then I was a SAHM and got out of practice. So in the past few years, I’ve had to relearn what I need to take on a business trip and what will just end up weighing me down.

When I’m on the road, here’s what I take:

It was beyond overdue. When I get busy, I put off office-related housekeeping until I have a couple free hours. Only those hours never seem to materialize. But having four days off gave me more than enough time to relax and still get around to cleaning.

Here’s why it’s a good idea to declutter your office on a regular basis:

1. You find things. I found a couple gift cards stuffed into a drawer full of business cards – perfect timing for the Christmas shopping I’m about to start.

2. You toss things. There’s nothing like the march of time to help you decide which papers need saving and which can be safely thrown away. Inevitably I save less than anticipated because the information is dated or not as important as I originally thought.

3. You file papers. Every pay stub or expense receipt filed now brings you that much closer to being ready to file your income tax return next year.

4. You shred papers. Nothing beats the satisfaction of watching years-old checking account or SEP_IRA statements eaten up by the shredder (I don’t save these anymore because I can get access to everything I need online).

5. You get ideas. Ever picked up a business card or brochure and thought, ‘That’d make a great story?’ only to come back to the office, toss it in a pile and forget it in the course of daily business? Sifting through piles brings those story ideas back to the surface.

6. You feel good. I don’t know about you, but when my office is organized, I feel better about myself, and work. Same applies to my closet and kitchen cupboards.

7. Your office looks great. My office is right off the house’s front entry. If it’s clean, I won’t have to be embarrassed when people visit during the holidays.

8. You give things away. There’s still a month left to donate items you no longer use. Thanks to my decluttering, I’ve got a pile of old electronics – scanner, cell phones, tape recorders – ready to take to Free Geek, and a bag of books that I’ll try to sell to Powell’s and if they don’t take them, give away.

9. You make room for new stuff. One of my 2011 New Year’s resolutions was replacing my ancient desktop PC with a new one. But I vowed not to bring anything new into my office until I’d gotten rid of old junk. Now that I’m clutter free, I can shop with a clear conscience.

10. You rid yourself of nagging guilt. The knowledge that I needed to clean my office but wasn’t doing it was mental baggage – i.e. guilt – weighing me down. Now that it’s done and off my physical and mental to-do lists I feel better about myself.

Had your own office cleaning revelations? Please share by leaving a comment.

Valerie Ward know this more than most. Ward has spent 16+ years working as a freelance writer and communications consultant, writing for private and public sector organizations as well as print and online publications.

In this guest post, Ward share some of the wisdom she’s collected from working with corporate clients. You can read more about Valerie and her work here.

Freelance writers on contract with big organizations can get caught in internal politics that range from needing to go through myriad approvals to riding out constantly shifting priorities.

It’s easy to feel frustrated and powerless, but there are ways to cope. Here are a few:

1. Help the client to help you. Prepare a schedule for the products you’ve been contracted to deliver, working back from the due date and factoring in approval cycles and other project milestones. Update it regularly and distribute updates to the client. Not only does a schedule help you, it helps organize the client, educating him or her about turnaround times and the effect of internal delays. Clients aren’t always aware of the role they have to play in helping freelancers deliver a quality product, whether it’s giving timely feedback on work or providing essential information and contacts.

2. Suggest ways to streamline approvals. If drafts must go through multiple approvals, encourage the client to appoint someone in-house to review changes, sort out discrepancies and consolidate everything into a single document before sending it back. An efficient approvals process will save the client time and money, as well as make your life simpler. Besides, an employee is in a better position than a contractor to talk to people who’ve made changes and negotiate what goes and what stays. By working with a one set of revisions, you can focus on the writing and editing you’ve been hired to do.

3. Don’t stress out when you can’t do anything. It can be crazy-making when you’re working on deadline and the project abruptly comes to a standstill for days or weeks. But if you can’t change it, don’t stress over it. Instead, take advantage of the delay to work on other projects or look for future business. Be patient. As long as the client understands that internal delays will affect the due dates, just accept them. They’re an unavoidable part of freelancing for organizations.

What are your secrets for dealing with large corporate clients?

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.

My secret weapon for meeting deadlines is getting up early – really early.

Last week when faced with a particularly grueling day, I was at my computer by 4:30 a.m. That gave me almost two hours of uninterrupted writing time before the normal unslaught of email, phone calls and family matters kicked in.

What’s your time management secret – turning off the phone? Logging off Facebook? Using an egg timer?

Please join me for the next WordCount Last Wednesday chat on Wednesday, Feb. 23 at 10 a.m. Pacific when we’ll talk about the real tricks of our trade – how writers can maximize their profitability by squeezing the most out of their time.

I’ll be hosting the chat and welcome everyone to participate, whether you freelance full- or part-time or work on staff at a magazine, newspaper or online publication. To follow along, use the hashtag #wclw.

At 10 a.m. we’ll all log on and introduce ourselves. After that, the chat will be organized around a  list of questions. We’ll leave  time at the end for a free-for-all discussion.

During the chat, here are the questions we’ll be discussing:

1. What is your biggest time management challenge?
2. What steps have you taken to use your time more wisely?
3. What tech tools do you use to be more productive?
4. How do you reward yourself when you meet time management goals?
5. What’s your time management advice for beginning writers?

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. 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 rest of this year’s WordCount Last Wednesday chats now, 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 in 2011, please contact me.

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.

***
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).

Another journalist was fired after it was discovered that he’d made up a source.

In this case, the journalist in question is Rob Sgobbo, a young and not very experienced reporter for the New York Daily News and freelancer for the Village Voice who, according to news reports, was canned after an editor discovered he’d fabricated sources and lied about his reporting.

Sgobbo may have been young, but he had to know what he was doing was wrong. He’d recently graduated from one of the best j-schools in the country, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he no doubt took a course in journalism ethics to get his degree.

This freelancer had everything going for him – great training, work at prestigious publications.

Why blow it by faking a source?

I know nothing about the particulars of the situation beyond what I’ve read. But I have my suspicions. They’re the same hunches I have every time I hear about a reporter who’s played fast and loose with the truth.

Here’s why I think journalists cheat:

1. Deadlines. They’re a relentless fact of life if you’re in the news business. But there are ways to deal with them.

2. Stress. Caused by deadlines.

3. Needing to find sources that fit a very specific description. I’m as guilty as the next editor of asking the writers I work with to find people, places or companies that exemplify the issue or trend they’re writing about. Is that hard? Yes. Is it impossible? No. It can take time. In fact, in some cases finding the right source can take the majority of the time and effort that goes into a story, especially if you’re searching for a specific type of person, or the source is reluctant to talk on the record but without whom there is no story.

4. Unreal expectations. Editors can have unrealistic expectations for what a writer can accomplish with limited resources in a given period of time, especially if a writer doesn’t say anything to set them straight. Writers can have equally unrealistic expectations about what they’re capable of producing given their experience, knowledge of the subject and time.

5. Culture of cheating. If high school and college students are OK with texting test answers to each other from cell phones stuffed inside their pants pockets or buy their ADHD friends’ Adderall to stay up all night studying for tests, it’s pretty easy to see how that could lead to a less-than-honest approach to reporting a story.

6. Laziness. We’re in a tough business that demands discipline and putting in the time. Making stuff up is the lazy man’s (or woman’s) way out.

7. Ego. Marry a little early success with career aspirations and superior intelligence, and some people think norms and standards don’t apply to them, or that they won’t get caught.

8. Money. It no secret freelance rates haven’t budged in years – decades even – and in the case of writing for the web have even dropped, especially since content factories such as Demand Media and Associated Content have entered the picture. Freelance writers try to make up for falling rates by taking on more work. Even if you’re maxed out, it’s tough to say no to assignments when you know you’ve got bills to pay. But there’s only so much productivity you can squeeze out of yourself, and I say this as someone who’s spent the last year working a lot of those 12-hour days and 60-hour weeks.

What are your thoughts on why writers cheat?

…but I’ll be back. After six straight weeks of posting every day, I’m taking the weekend off. Check in with WordCount next Monday for fresh news and views from the freelance writing business.

If you’ve sworn off online communities like Facebook and Twitter because all people seem to do on them is goof around, consider joining LinkedIn, the site that puts the “work” in “social network.”

While other online networks might be bigger – Facebook now has more members than the entire U.S. population – LinkedIn is specifically tailored to the world of work. No Mafia Wars. No Farmville. Instead, you’ll find people talking shop, looking for jobs or job candidates and connecting with colleagues past, present and future.

Read the rest of this post at SecondAct.com: The social network that puts work first.

You’ll be shocked at the answer – though if you’ve been in the freelance business very long maybe you won’t be.

I posed that question last week to the members of Freelance Success, a subscription-only message board for independent journalists, paid bloggers and other professional freelancers.

Of the 20 or so writers who answered, only one had three or more clients who paid invoices via direct deposits into her checking account. A couple others had two clients who made direct deposits. The majority had one or none.

Me? I have one – and they started making direct deposits only last month, although before that they paid via wire transfer, which is even faster though my bank charged a small fee for accepting them.

It’s not like direct deposits are all that innovative. When I worked at a daily newspaper some 20 years ago, my twice-monthly paychecks went straight into my checking account.

So why are publishers so reluctant to keep up with the electronic times?

Could it be they want to hang onto their money as long as possible, including the time it takes a check to get from the accounting department to their contributors’ mailboxes? Are times so bad they need the float on what amounts to a blip in the overall scheme of publishing industry expenses?

Are they do behind the times they have yet to automate expense management?

What other reasonable explanation could there be?

Or is my sample bad, and most writers are being paid this way?

For all the grousing I do about content mills like Demand Media, they do have one thing going for them – they use PayPal and other online payment mechanisms to pay contributors, though in many cases writers must earn a minimum amount before they see a dime.

Given what I think of content sites, you know things are bad when I’m siding with the Demand Medias of the world.

The next time you’re negotiating with a new publishing client, speak up. Ask to be paid via direct deposit. Strike that. Demand to be paid via direct deposit. It’s time we freelancers took a stand and dragged publishers into the electronic payment age.