What’s on the iPod: Glorious by MaMuse
It’s Monday — do you know where your weekend went?
It was a good weekend. The only damper in it was my son was on his way when his car started making grinding noises. That’s never good. He had to turn around and head back.
However, it was still a good weekend. A cousin was in town unexpectedly, I was able to read a book, and I didn’t have to work for 56 whole hours. Given the huge load of projects on my desk last Monday, that in itself is a miracle.
In fact, last week I found myself quite close to my breaking point. Too many projects, more coming in, and I had just pushed a little harder on the marketing toward the end of September (not one of these projects came from that push, which added to my anxiety over way too much work for the time I had).
By working through lunches and avoiding email, I whittled the seven-project pile down to one. I have two coming in this week. I’m ready for them. There was a point last week, though, where I thought one more project and I’d have to turn something down. I nearly did, but I managed to find time to squeeze in the small project from a favorite client.
Still, in my view, having too much work is a sign something isn’t quite right. Yes, it could be the marketing was working, but as I mentioned earlier, none of this came in as a result of my marketing. One was a referral job, one came from my website, another came through an editor, one was a regular client….
I pulled out a few of my strategies to help reduce some of the stress (and at times, some of the clients) without impacting my earnings. Here are some things I’ve done in the past that work:
Charge more. It’s an easy way to rid yourself of the busy work and save that time for the meatier, more lucrative jobs. Tough to do as there are clients you may not want to part with. If you can keep them, do. Just charge future clients a higher rate.
Push back on deadlines. Had I accepted every deadlines as stated, I’d have been working through the night with some of these. Instead, I pushed back on a few, and I got the changes I needed. It was an easy sell — I said quite frankly I wanted to make sure I had the time to do the job right.
Track every project. I mentioned last week that I put everything on my Outlook calendar. If I hadn’t, I’d have lost track of at least two projects (and I still had some momentary panic — alleviated by my calendar task list).
Don’t answer right away. It’s why I turned my email off. If another client’s note comes in, my mind is now on that project. The shift between one project and another takes me a good 15 minutes or so to recover from. So I shut the damn thing down until I took a break. No one says you have to answer your email within seconds of receiving it, right?
Let absentee clients stay absent. One revision was due to me two weeks ago. On any other day, I’d have checked in with the client. However, I saw it as a chance to catch up. I let it slide and, lo and behold, I bought four more days. The client got in touch on Thursday. That meant I had a small window of time in which to deal with the revisions.
Writers, how do you avoid burnout?
Have you ever had a client move on because you pushed back on price or availability?
What do you do when your projects threaten to outpace the time you have to do them?
5 responses to “Avoiding the Freelance Writing Burnout”
Lori, you're speaking my language. I do all of those. Sometimes clients have moved on, but believe it or not, one client who balked at my rates when they went up last year has just come back to ask me to write for them again. 🙂
Perfect timing for me Lori! I'm having to look at my workload going forward because I'm having too many weeks like you describe. I already push back on deadlines if I have to (using the reason that I don't want lack of time to impact the quality of my work), and I track projects via an excel spreadsheet (you can take the girl out of the finance department, but you can't take the finance department out of the girl).
I think 'don't answer right away' is something that would make a big difference to me – I've already lose two hours this morning having a back and forth and working things out for a new project. If I'd have left it, I'd be further forward with this week's deadlines!
We've been in the same boat the past couple of weeks, Lori, and the sheer idea of getting several of these projects sent in this week is motivation enough to plow through the work.
I couldn't charge more, since these were all articles, but the lowest paying ones are 75¢/wd and the best (due today!) is $1.20/wd. So there's not a lot to complain about,pay wise. Oh, I also have a list of 31 executive write-ups due to another client, those don't pay much per word, but no interviews are needed. The only time-consuming part is already done: notifying a bunch of publicists so they can send me the info I need. Each blurb takes maybe 10 minutes to write up, so it's simple, straightforward work.
I've been doing a lot of the things on your list, but I also found it easier to focus on one client's work in the morning, another in the afternoon. Sometimes that gets broken down even further to make sure I keep moving on several projects. Of course, today, I'll focus mostly on the piece that's due today, but I know a 1PM interview for a different article will interrupt me. After that, I'll go back to the one that's due (if I haven't finished already), then turn my attention to one of the other projects until another interview that's slated for 6pm. (Darn west coasters!)
I often say I'm semi-retired as I do not take on projects in the volume that you do, Lori and Sharon. I still work 5 days a week (normal hours!) but never the weekends, which I did regularly in my corporate days. My workload is certainly not what it was in my corporate days. And that's VERY much by design.
Besides the fact it almost killed me, I also have family responsibilities, living with my 92-year-old mother. I am not saying my responsibilities are more than anyone else. But they are a priority for me and I refuse to let work take over my life like it did in my corporate days.
So while I feel like a bit of lightweight in terms of projects, I still have the dilemma of knowing where to draw the line. In the beginning, I accepted almost anything that came my way. That just didn't work for me.
It's the rare exception when I do what I call "one and done" projects. It is also the rare exception when I find clients are unwilling to nudge a deadline.
I have had prospects (can't remember any clients) move on because I nudged back on a deadline. Definitely have had prospects move on because of my rates. Used to bother me. Seldom does now.
Love when they come back to quality, Sharon! 🙂
Emily, time to raise those rates! You will lose some clients, but it may be time to lose some, by the sounds of it. And same here with the back-and-forth on projects. They're knocking on my email door today, but I'm working through something else first. At lunchtime, I'll respond!
Good way to break up the workload, Paula. I had to prioritize first, then get the hard stuff down on paper. I stuck a release in between projects because they're usually easiest to write.
Cathy, I think that's a healthy attitude. I've gotten much better at drawing the line. There's one of these current projects that may not work out, and I'm okay with walking away from it should it become too much of a hassle. No amount of money could make an impossible situation any better, right?