Photo by Timothy K. Hamilton

I recently attended the Speed Money Seminar and had the opportunity to listen to great speakers such as Alex Mandossian, Armand Morin, Michel and Sylvie Fortin, Matt Bacak, Eric Graham, Ray Edwards, Kirt Christensen, and Stu McLaren.

Throughout the weekend I had hundreds of business ideas and blog posts running through my head. The article that I’ve been most excited to share with you, however, is based on Alex Mandossian’s presentation “How to Get MORE Done…Faster, Better and with Less Human Effort.”

If you’re interested in propelling your freelance writing career to the next level, regardless of what level that might be, read on. If not, you should probably spend your time doing something else. Read the rest of this entry »

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A month has past since you sat down and put together your New Year’s resolutions. If you’re like me, then a few of your goals had to do with your freelancing career. This year I made it my goal to:

• Start and grow a blog.
• Increase my income every month.
• Add more repeat clients.
• Start developing a passive income.

I find that New Year’s resolutions are only achievable if they are broken down into smaller chunks. Therefore I set 30 and 60 day goals for myself at the beginning of each month. By doing this and keeping the big picture in mind, I stay motivated and give myself a chance of actually reaching my dream targets.

My goals for January were to:

• Write an eBook.
• Add 3 new repeat clients.
• Make $xx00.
• Start a blog

I feel quite comfortable with how I closed the month off. I wrote an eBook and am currently editing it, I added 3 solid repeat clients, made $50 short of my goal, and started this blog. I am very excited about the momentum I have gained this new year and believe that I have nowhere to go but up…and that’s exactly where I’m intending to go.

For February I am hoping to complete my eBook and have it ready to sell, add 2 more repeat clients, make $300 more than January, and build my blog’s readership.

While there are a number of ways that I stay task-oriented throughout the month, I find that the best tool I have ever used is a daytime planner. Each night before I go to bed, I write out my goals for the next day. Sometimes I’ll have 6 small projects to complete while other days I’ll have one or two larger projects. By writing down a manageable list and completing it each day, I stay focussed and productive.

Are you still on track with your New Year’s resolution? How do you keep on top of things?

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As a freelance writer you are free to do set your own schedule, your own pace, and your own lifestyle. One of the big advantages that people often talk about is that freelancers can travel the world and work anywhere they go. But I am not wondering if it’s possible or not to write anywhere you go, I’m wondering if it’s actually probable.

Can you, as a freelance writer, write from anywhere you go?

I tend to sit either at my desk (when I’ve got a tough project) or on my couch (when I’m blogging or doing quicker articles). If I try working other places I find that I am far less productive, making it almost a complete waste of time.

My last two vacations I had the idea of working for 3 hours a day in the evenings…but that didn’t quite happen:

• Lincoln, Nebraska (visiting my fiancee): On this trip I simply couldn’t get any work done. Okay, I might be be under exaggerating, but I completed the bare necessities and nothing else. Granted, I was in Lincoln to ask my girlfriend of two years to marry me…so the excitement definitely played a huge role, but outside of that I still thought I would have been able to focus a bit more. I couldn’t.
• Las Vegas, Nevada (BlogWorld Conference): On this trip I was in awe of the bright lights and gambling that was all around me. While I won some money playing poker, I didn’t make too much money by working on freelancing projects. The hotel room is a tough place to work when you know you’re in Vegas. I just couldn’t get it done…

Now I’m considering a trip to Alberta to visit some of my close friends from college. My only concern around this trip is that I really do have work to do. I wouldn’t feel accomplished if I wasn’t able to get 5 hours of work done each day while I was there – and I’d be hoping to stay for a week.

I know freelancing is all about being free, but I was wondering if there were any pointers for staying focussed while you travel, while you’re around friends, and while you’re around family. I tend to work in extremely quiet environment – is it possible to find such a thing on the road? Is it possible to focus when you’re on an exciting trip?

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What are you doing to push your freelancing career to the next level? Are you happy with where you are today? Do you have goals to become more tomorrow?

People often wonder why things never seem to go their way. You might be feeling bad for yourself that nobody has asked you to complete a project for them today, you might be quietly complaining to yourself about the low rates you’re receiving for your work, or you might be frustrated by your lack of a portfolio…but none of that matters.

It doesn’t matter how bad you feel about your situation right now, all that matters is where you’ll be tomorrow. Unless you’re starving and sleeping in a field, you’ve got no reason to complain – there’s a lot of potential out there, all you need to do is grab hold of it.

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

Have you been marketing yourself like crazy? Have you been bidding for jobs? Have you been trying to create multiple streams of income? Have you been reading and studying to improve your work?

If you haven’t been pushing your visibility and services to the next level, then there’s no reason why the next level will ever come to you.

There are a number of things that can boost your productivity as a writer, but the most important aspect of it (at least in my mind) is to boost the demand for your services. The more work I have to do, the more work I accomplish. I have gone weeks at a time doing just enough to get by with plenty of free time left over…it’s easy to do. Until you make the choice to push yourself out of mediocrity, you won’t become anything other than average.

What are some things that you’ve been doing to grow your career? What are some excuses you’ve used in the past to stay where you were? How did you snap out of it?

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One of the biggest drawbacks from my paycheck each month isn’t the hourly rate I am paid while I’m on the clock, it isn’t the way I communicate with my clients, nor is it the quality of work that I provide. No…the biggest setback is the amount of time that I waste.

You know what I mean…checking email 20 times a day, peeking at message boards, instant messaging with friends, checking Facebook, and turning on the TV for a quick “work break.” It happens and it’s okay, but it also needs to be limited.

Are there times when a writer needs to take a brain break? Absolutely. Does that need to happen 10 times a day? Never.

It’s much easier to waste time than it is to stay productive, but if you want to separate yourself from the pack and take your business to a new level, then you’ve got to learn some new techniques to keep yourself focussed. Here are a few tricks that I have used to stay on-task and improve my productivity by over 200%:

1. Plan Your Day: Every night before I go to bed, I write down everything I want to accomplish the next day. An important thing to keep in mind when setting daily goals is that you never want to give yourself too little nor too much to do. If you give yourself an easy list, you can expect to procrastinate until 2pm before you even begin working hard. If you give yourself too much to do then you’ll feel bogged down, possibly give up, and get less done than you would have with a couple less items.I try to stick to 6 things each day that I feel need my utmost attention. This often looks like: (1) 1500 word sales letter for Whoever, (2) one 400 word article for this publication, (3) five bids on Elance, (4) contact 3 clients, (5) write 2 pages for Ebook, and (6) maintain blogs. This schedule is manageable without being too hectic and has a good balance of making-money now, planning for next week, as well as working towards having a passive income.
2. Schedule Your Breaks: We all need breaks, but we often take them more than we need to. Know what I mean? If you were able to schedule your breaks then it would be much easier for you to stay on take while you’re actually working. If you don’t have work time differentiated from break time, then you’ll find that they sometimes accidentally blend together, which is something that you never want to happen.
3. Turn Off Auto-Notifications: If you check your email every time that a new one comes in, then you’re not only disrupting whatever you’re doing for the moment, but you’re likely moving towards a task that will only side-track you further. There is no such thing as being momentarily side-tracked.We all know that five-minutes quickly turns into 30 and before you know it, you forget what you were working on in the first place.If you can resist the temptation to check every email that comes through your instant messenger, that’s great. But if you can’t then you really need to figure out how to turn these auto-notifications off so that you can stay on task and accomplish your goals for the day.

By applying these tips and finding others that help you stay on-task as much as possible, you’ll find that you’ll easily be able to save a couple hours each day and get much more accomplished than you ever have before.

Don’t go by the old slogan, “if you have nothing to do, look busy.” Instead, if you don’t have something to do, find something! There’s always a task that you can find that will help you to move you closer to the success that you dream about. Let’s face it, we all want to be successful, but we aren’t all doing the things we need to do to become successful. However, if you follow these three tips then you’ll likely be closer than you were before.

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