All kinds of updates
By Katharine Swan On Thursday, March 29, 2007 At
2:25 PM
My Blogger account has had some problems for the last couple of days, so several of my posts didn't appear until today (finally!). Be sure to read everything and catch up!
I have a number of updates:
The Lieurance-King Article Challenge:
Yeah, that SO didn't happen. I've been too busy catching up on PAID work to write marketing articles. However, I hate not finishing things I set out to do, so I'm setting a challenge for myself: To finish my 30 articles by the end of April.
The Inkthinker Query Challenge:
I didn't send off any queries in February, but I did get a couple of in March. I'm up to a whopping 9 queries for the year. Obviously, I have a lot of catching up to do there, too.
My sleep schedule:
You'd be impressed -- when we were visiting Michael's family, I got up as early as 8:00 one day (that's 7:00 in Denver). It was solely to watch/help as Panama got his hooves trimmed, though. Without that kind of incentive here, I'm back to sleeping until 10:30-ish each day. That's not bad, though, considering that a month ago I was going to bed around 5am and sleeping until 1 or 2pm each day.
My work hours:
I never realized how few billable hours I worked every day until I started keeping track. Now that I am tracking it, though, I've been able to make a definite improvement. I'm still only getting about 6 billable hours a day, though; the rest is spent searching for jobs, corresponding with clients, blogging, networking, and doing a hundred other little time-consuming tasks.
My workload:
Going on vacation always screws me up; I always think I can work in the car, and it almost never happens. In other words, when I got back I had lots to do.
There's good news, though. After several crazy days of working almost non-stop since we got back, I have not just caught up on several assignments -- I have also prepared my estimated tax worksheet and figured out how much I need to make in the way of payments this year.
(That's my least favorite part of freelancing, by the way. I can handle filing my taxes, but I hate estimated tax payments. Probably has something to do with all of the dire warnings of the penalties you'll face if you mess up.)
I still have more work to catch up on, but the point is that the list is much shorter. I think that's partly because of my efforts to track my billable hours -- I'm working harder at this than I used to.
All in all, I think that's a positive list of updates. With the exception of those challenges I tried to take on (and failed miserably), I'm doing pretty well.
I have a number of updates:
The Lieurance-King Article Challenge:
Yeah, that SO didn't happen. I've been too busy catching up on PAID work to write marketing articles. However, I hate not finishing things I set out to do, so I'm setting a challenge for myself: To finish my 30 articles by the end of April.
The Inkthinker Query Challenge:
I didn't send off any queries in February, but I did get a couple of in March. I'm up to a whopping 9 queries for the year. Obviously, I have a lot of catching up to do there, too.
My sleep schedule:
You'd be impressed -- when we were visiting Michael's family, I got up as early as 8:00 one day (that's 7:00 in Denver). It was solely to watch/help as Panama got his hooves trimmed, though. Without that kind of incentive here, I'm back to sleeping until 10:30-ish each day. That's not bad, though, considering that a month ago I was going to bed around 5am and sleeping until 1 or 2pm each day.
My work hours:
I never realized how few billable hours I worked every day until I started keeping track. Now that I am tracking it, though, I've been able to make a definite improvement. I'm still only getting about 6 billable hours a day, though; the rest is spent searching for jobs, corresponding with clients, blogging, networking, and doing a hundred other little time-consuming tasks.
My workload:
Going on vacation always screws me up; I always think I can work in the car, and it almost never happens. In other words, when I got back I had lots to do.
There's good news, though. After several crazy days of working almost non-stop since we got back, I have not just caught up on several assignments -- I have also prepared my estimated tax worksheet and figured out how much I need to make in the way of payments this year.
(That's my least favorite part of freelancing, by the way. I can handle filing my taxes, but I hate estimated tax payments. Probably has something to do with all of the dire warnings of the penalties you'll face if you mess up.)
I still have more work to catch up on, but the point is that the list is much shorter. I think that's partly because of my efforts to track my billable hours -- I'm working harder at this than I used to.
All in all, I think that's a positive list of updates. With the exception of those challenges I tried to take on (and failed miserably), I'm doing pretty well.
Labels: blogging, freelancing, goals, Inkthinker Query Challenge, Lieurance-King Article Challenge, marketing
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