How freelancers can organize their writing time

It’s back to school time. In that spirit of higher education, over the next month or so, I’ll be running a series of posts on freelancing basics.

Today’s lesson – organizing your writing time.

It’s one thing to get assignments. It’s another to schedule your time to maximize your earnings potential. Here’s one way to do it. For it you’ll need:

• A calendar – I use the calendar built into Microsoft Outlook, but any online or paper calendar will do.
• Colored markers – Only if you’re using a paper calendar. If you use the Outlook calendar, use the “Label” feature.
• All your freelance work for one month, including assignments, marketing and administrative tasks.

1. On the calendar, plot out all the hours of each day you’re available to work during the month. I use the color-coded labels in the Outlook calendar to highlight my available work hours.

Can’t find the Label feature? Go to the Outlook calendar, find or create an appointment, then right click on it and you’ll see a drop down menu with “Label” on the list. If you haven’t used Label before, open the drop down box and click on “Edit Labels” at the bottom to give names to the 10 possible Label colors.

When blocking out time on your calendar, include all non-work obligations – doctor appointments, haircuts, exercise classes, carpool pickups, etc. – so you have the most accurate picture of your available hours to work.

2. Next collect all your work projects due that month. Calculate how many hours you expect to spend on each. For example, if you have a 1,500-word feature story that will require a half dozen or more interviews and you know you can write about 1,000 words a day, you might allot yourself 4 days for the entire assignment: 2.5 days to arrange and complete interviews and 1.5 days to write the story. Or you may calculate how much time to allot to a story based on what you’re being paid or what type of hourly rate you like to maintain. If the fee for that 1,500-word story is $1/word, that’s $1,500, and if you normally shoot for making $50 an hour, you need to slot out 30 hours.

3. With the estimated numbers of hours you need for the assignment in mind, work backwards from the story’s due date and plug the hours you need to devote to the story into your calendar.

4. If you’ve got multiple  stories due on the same day – it’s one of the laws of freelancing, if you have three projects in a month, chances are they’re all due on the same day – decide how you’ll allocate the hours you need to devote to each story in order to get them all done on time. If you have two stories due on the same day, maybe you’ll do all of the research and writing for one first and file it a week ahead of time. Or maybe you’ll do interviews for both stories simultaneously and then write one after the other.

5. Don’t forget to allot time on your calendar for activities that aren’t directly related to assignments. This could include researching and writing queries, researching publications you might want to pitch, writing letters of introduction to editors, billing, updating your LinkedIn or Facebook pages, and of course, working on your next month’s calendar. If you have a personal blog, don’t forget to build in time for that too.

6. Build in extra time for everything. I am 100 percent guilty of being overly optimistic about how much I can accomplish in any given day, week or month. I’ve started to build a couple extra hours or days into projects so I’m covered in case an assignment takes a lot longer than anticipated, an editor asks for rewrites I hadn’t planned on or I get sick and have to take a couple days off work.

Got your own secrets for scheduling your work day?