Freelance Writing and Research

How Do You Structure Your Day?

Organization is not really my strong point I suppose that when it comes to writing and organization what I really have is organized chaos. One of the problems is something that most freelancers and wahms face; because you are at home people think that they can just drop by or they will ask you to do them a favor. It doesn't matter how many times I tell other family members that I am actually working they will still drop by and expect me to stop work for a while. Not good when you are trying to meet a deadline and something that totally defeats any structure you may have mapped out.

Work at Home and Other Work

Most of my time is taken up working from home but I still supervise half a dozen postgraduate students, teach a course on religion and society at a university in another town and undertake freelance research. Supervising postgrads is a moveable feast because they also are busy people, on supervision days I get very little writing work done and when I have a research project (which I do at the moment) I try to allocate a day a week to that. The longest part of a research contract is interpreting the data and writing up the report when it is report time I try to free a whole weekend for that.

Back to the Beginning

If you are a freelance writer then you do have to make room for other things and find time for your home and family. No matter how hard work at home writers try to be organized there is always something waiting to jump up and nip you in the neck as my writing friend Dana also finds - and something that I have written of elsewhere.

No matter how hard I try I cannot seem to type any faster than I do - and I do type pretty quickly - sometimes I think that I'm trying to squeeze too much into a day; but when I look around others are in pretty much the same boat and I don't think I would want to change my life as a writer. I just need to be a little more organized.