All kinds of updates

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.