The biggest lies I tell myself as a freelancer

Tags

deep vein thrombosis, freelancing, lies, Lois, priorities, time management, Twitter, work/life balance

Freelancers have the worst bosses. When you are the one holding you accountable for everything every day, denial and self-deception often run rampant. In an effort to hold my own feet to the fire, here is my confession. This is how I lie to myself.

• I’ll remember that idea. I am writing this blog today with many grumbles, as just a couple of days ago, while walking Lois in the woods, I was overwhelmed with a handful of blog ideas. Multiple ideas! So many of them! And they were all so good, I couldn’t possibly forget them!

I forgot them. So I’m writing this instead.

• 

  Lois lies to herself sometimes too.

  I will email them as soon as the story runs Sources are always asking me to email them as soon as their story runs. And I do. Sometimes. On bigger stories I care about the most. Or people who will definitely share and benefit the story. Er…let’s just stick with sometimes. To be full-time freelancer writer, you have to put out a ton of content. Some of it just goes out there and you just can’t check in on it or follow up with it in any way. I’m sorry world. I really mean it when I say I’ll do it.

• I will work on my creative writing as soon as I finish all of this stuff. When and if “all of this stuff” is done, I’m not going to want to do shit. I’m going to watch SVU reruns and sauté some asparagus. If I don’t schedule it in and do it before closing time, it just doesn’t happen.

• I will stand up and walk around in a minute. If I dedicated half the time I spend worrying about deep vein thrombosis to actually taking a break and walking around for a minute, I’d never have to worry about it again.

• I’m doing great on Twitter Sometimes I’m doing fine on Twitter, but I’m never doing great. I tweet out, but rarely engage with others. I plead Midwestern/non-confrontational/shy/busy, but the truth is, I think it’s a control thing. Unlike Facebook or my blog, there’s a sense of chaos and judgement there that I find intimidating. I need to get over it. I’m going to get over it. So I say. All the time.

• I am maintaining pretty good work/life balance. It’s not that I never chill out. It’s that when I do chill out, I really struggle to get back to work. I’m either working all day, every day, or I take a break and cannot unbreak. It is exhausting. Balance for me is a constant struggle between one extreme and the next. I’ve found that one of the toughest things about finding middle ground is that I can’t say “no” — to deadlines I can’t beat without killing myself, or to myself when I have a minute of free time and turn it into an hour. No, Natalie. Bad Natalie.

• I’m too tired to work. Okay. Sometimes I am too tired to work. But most of the time I’m too tired to do some work. Creative work is actually best done when tired, says science, so that creative writing I have a hard time fitting in should really be done when sleepy anyway. Look at this, I just lied four points up on this page. What a liar.

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Everything, every day

Tags

daily tasks, lists, making lists, priorities, task management, weekly to-dos

To-do list anxiety. A lot of professionals deal with it, but for the self-employed, it’s a particular challenge. Between all of the things that need to be done for clients and all of the things that are important to do to promote oneself and all of things to do to keep long-term, unpaid creative projects moving forward, prioritization can be…what’s the word I’m looking for?…a complete %@*^ing nightmare.

What? Do you not have folder full of task management tools on your phone?

I like consistency. I like daily consistency. While client work always gets first billing (because that’s the only way I get to do any billing), it is important to me to tweet, keep up with my online content sources, blog (ahem), work on my own writing, stay on top of my email and read at least a few lines of a book every single day. And because I pretend I believe in balance, I tend to believe working out, walking the dog, trying a new recipe and a nominal amount of housework should also be daily activities.

Obviously, I don’t do all of these things every day. I just intend to, and then feel like a failure when I don’t.

But I was reading a book about nutrition recently (because why not?), and came across something that shook my to-do list philosophy for the better. Rather than freaking out about getting all the nutrients your body needs every day, it said to think about achieving balance over a week. This is particularly helpful for a vegetarian who eats fish, like me. Because if you try to eat fish every day to meet your protein needs, you’ll basically become walking mercury vessel and die (or something).

The same idea can be applied to getting all of the things done that are important to do. As time and space have proven, it’s just not possible to do everything that needs to done with consistency every single day. A few times a week? That can probably work. In fact, it’s bound to work exactly the way it does now, without all of the guilt. If daily consistency is so important, remaining consistently free of needless guilt seems like an acceptable substitute to freaking out over my hour-to-hour Twitter activity. Bi-hourly Twitter monitoring seems like plenty.

 

Awesome things I don’t do

Tags

aspirations, awesome things, bike share, bulk, priorities, riding the bus, zip car

Sometimes I have a bit of an enthusiasm problem. I hear about a thing, I get excited about it, and I just sort of decide I’m a person who participates in it. I absorb it into my identity without actually executing the thing. There are just too many super cool things in the world and not enough time or energy for implementation. Maybe by listing some of them publicly I will pressure myself to do some of them. Or, at the very least, relieve myself of the guilt of pretending I do them, because look, I said it here once that I don’t.

These are the awesomest things I don’t do:

• Bike Sharing How amazing and cool is this concept? The bike I own but never use would probably be the first to call me out on this one.

• Refilling Containers at Bulk Stores I wrote a story about this recently and was like, OH MY GOSH, MY LIFE HAS CHANGED FOREVER. Meanwhile, I haven’t run out of shampoo yet and I’ve made one single strip to the bulk food store. Two months ago.

• 

  So many awesome things to do in the world. So many other pressing matters.

  Zip Car Both my husband and my car are getting up there, and I keep fantasizing that Zip Car, which does exist in Ann Arbor, is a possible alternative to replacing one of them. I mean, I work from home, right? We’ll never do it. We should, but we won’t.

• Baking Bread The worst things about this are a) I have a bread maker, b) I used to use it all the time, c) it takes 10 minutes.

• Day Trips Two years ago I announced to my husband that we would be spending at least one weekend a month in Detroit. Guess how many times we’ve gone? Counting the Justin Timberlake concert? Twice. So, once.

• Riding the Bus If I could change one thing about myself it would be to become the kind of person who ride the bus. I want to, so much. There’s a stop a block from our house. And I don’t.

• Local Events There are so many cool local events here in Ann Arbor. And I used to be a person who put on local events. Instead, I watch SVU reruns in my sweatpants.

I might start doing these things. Here’s hoping, right? Anything awesome you never do? It’s okay. You can confess.