Beating the need for a nap

One of the biggest challenges I've encountered as a freelance writer is staying awake all day. Working from home makes that afternoon nap harder to resist, probably because I'm surrounded by the quiet comforts of home. Plus, those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I tend toward a rather nontraditional schedule. For almost a year now, though, I've been forcing myself to go to bed earlier and get up at a decent time (before 9:00 most mornings!). Although I'm not as productive in the daytime as I am late at night, there are some other advantages, such as being on a similar schedule as my husband.

Unfortunately, it does mean that I struggle with sleepiness in the afternoon, particularly on days when I don't go to the barn in the morning. Although it's nice to take a nap sometimes, I almost never take short ones, so a "quick" nap blows half my afternoon. Therefore I've had to learn a few tricks for combating afternoon sleepiness.

* Drink plenty of water. I learned this trick from our water department newsletter, of all places. (Kudos to the writer who put that newsletter together!) Apparently mild dehydration can actually cause you to feel a little sleepy.

* Eat a small lunch. A large meal will make you feel sleepy in the afternoon. I prefer to eat a lighter lunch, along with some snacks throughout the day if I get hungry.

* Snack on something spicy. Did you know that spicy food can actually wake you up if you are getting sleepy? Eat something spicy for lunch, or snack on chips and salsa in the afternoon when you feel yourself starting to drag.

* Go for a walk. Exercise will also wake you up if you are getting sleepy. Even if you don't have time to work out during the day, a 30-minute walk around the neighborhood should get rid of the urge to take a nap. I even sometimes will get up and put away a load of laundry, just to get out of my chair and move around a little!

* Change the scenery. I'm actually writing this from Starbucks on Friday afternoon. I'm a big fan of going to coffee shops and bookstores occasionally to work — if I'm feeling sleepy or bored, I find it usually revives me to work someplace with a little activity. It's hard not to want to sleep when you are surrounded by napping dogs and cats all day long!

Do you struggle with afternoon sleepiness, and if so, how do you stay awake and productive?

Do you work weekends?

One of the things I like best about freelancing is the ability to determine your own schedule. For some freelancers, this means working in the evenings and on the weekends in order to make time for things you want to do during the day.

For example, I love going out to the barn to ride my horse in the mornings, when it isn't as busy. However, this often means I have some work left to do in the evenings. My husband and I work around this by going to a bookstore so I can work in the cafe while he browses, or we just stay home and he plays Xbox while I work.

Likewise, I use weekends as my backup plan. If, for some reason, I don't get something done during the week that I'd planned to do, I can work a little on the weekend. Usually we either go to a bookstore, or I work for an hour or so late at night, after Michael has gone to bed.

Working weekends is getting more rare for me, but it's still always a possibility. I actually kind of like the feeling of always having something to do. I know other freelancers, however, who prefer to maintain firm boundaries with their clients. They don't work evenings or weekends, don't even answer client emails unless it's during normal business hours.

There is definitely some merit to that kind of approach. Some clients will take advantage if you let them, contacting you at all hours with last-minute projects and revision requests. Having office hours will set boundaries prevent that kind of client from making you miserable. But in my opinion, there are advantages to a more flexible schedule, too, as it enables you to work around your life, rather than living around your work.

What about you? Do you work weekends sometimes, always, or not at all?

Pet peeves

Yesterday, when I was browsing Craigslist, an ad I've seen before caught my eye. It was for a website with a list of locations and reviews of Denver area dog parks, so I decided to check it out.

The site was awful. It looked like a free site, for one thing, and the layout sucked. But the content was also really bad. One of my pet peeves is overuse of keywords, and this site had it in spades.

Feeling nice, I clicked on the email link in the Craigslist ad and sent a nice email, saying that someone had clearly given them bad advice on how to handle keywords, and offering to give them a few tips on how to make the content better. Know what I earned for my generosity? An email asking me to donate my services to rewrite the pages, since of course, it's a "nonprofit website."

Enter another one of my pet peeves: People who try to get free work out of writers by claiming they are a nonprofit. The really annoying thing was that the website had ads plastered across the top of every page, so it's not unprofitable for lack of trying! Failing to earn any ad revenue doesn't make you a nonprofit, honey.

I responded and let them know in no uncertain terms that I wasn't going to be taken advantage of, but that the offer for some advice was still open if they wanted to take me up on it. Did they? No, of course not.

Which brings us to my biggest pet peeve of all: People who put crappy content on the Internet, know it's crappy, and don't care.

What are your biggest pet peeves?

A top freelance blog - really, me?

I am a bit behind in reporting this astonishing award. As usual, I've been quite busy. A great deal of it has been how frequently I've been riding my horse — in the last two weeks, I stayed home from several trail rides, and was amazed at how much more work I got done when I did.

Anyway, I recently received an email notifying me that Swan's Pond has been chosen as one of the 2010 Top 40 Freelance Blogs. Granted, I am number 39, but still — what an honor! And especially considering how sporadically I've been posting lately!

Speaking of which, now that I feel like I'm getting my schedule under control, I am going to try to start posting regularly again. I have some good posts planned, and I am going to try for two or three posts a week to start!

Thanks to Emma Lee at AwardingTheWeb.com for the Top Freelance Blog award!

Coming back from holidays

Coming back after a long weekend is always so difficult! Michael took Friday off, and since I have a hard time working when he is home, by default so did I. When I sat down last night to make my to-do list for today, I had such a hard time getting my mind to switch gears.

We didn't do much to speak of over the weekend, just mainly relaxed and enjoyed ourselves. Neither of us are big partiers or even particularly fond of fireworks — having a dog who is terrified of them makes it difficult to enjoy the holiday. We usually spend the evenings trying to soothe Grace, and I like to head out to the barn to check on Panama around firework time.

I did go for trail rides Sunday and Monday mornings, and we spent some time this weekend with family (my mom came over Friday night, and Michael's parents came over last night). But if it's this hard to come back to work for me, I can imagine how difficult it must be for those who like to party all weekend!

How did everyone else celebrate America's birthday?

A writer's administrative duties

I had a rather harsh reminder recently not to ignore the administrative duties that comes with being a freelance writer. I used to be on top of my email inbox at all times, but in the last couple of years I have gotten pretty lax about filing client emails and deleting unimportant ones. As a result, my PST file got so big that it locked me out Saturday night.

And unfortunately, since I've also been lax about backing up my work files, I didn't have any recent (as in, newer than 6 months ago) backups.

So I spent about 15 agonizing hours trying to rescue my PST file without trimming off too much of the valuable data it contained. Every time I trimmed it, I also had to scan and repair it, so the process took a while each time. By trimming a megabyte at a time, I finally got a workable file with 10MB trimmed off.

I got lucky and it doesn't seem like I lost much, if anything at all, but I will need to be careful in the future so that it doesn't happen again. This means, however, that I need to be sure not to let myself get so busy that I don't have time for administrative tasks. I found those and housework (especially laundry!) are the first to go when I get really busy, because I sure as heck am not giving up my time with my horse. What do you give up first when you get busy? And how do you manage your time so that the tasks you don't prioritize as high still get done?

Good idea, bad writing

One of my favorite horse blogs, Fugly Horse of the Day, featured an Examiner.com article today. The premise was great — she applied to several horse rescues with made-up financial information, pictures of a property that's not hers, and even a picture of a starving horse she doesn't own. It was a great idea for investigative journalism: One rescue actually approved her, while one only denied her when they saw the picture of the horse. As she pointed out, she could have taken pictures of a beautiful property and a gorgeous horse, and they would have welcomed her with open arms, without ever checking that the property and the horse actually belonged to her.

(I'm linking to Fugly's post, by the way, NOT to the Examiner.com article. You can get there from the blog post if you want to read it, but I don't want to contribute inbound links to that site. Not that it'll make a difference, but still.)

Like I said in the title, great idea... Bad writing. The article was littered with grammatical errors, and lots of bad decisions about when to capitalize. (Seriously! Why do some people capitalize everything that seems remotely important to them?!) The writing also lacked some pizazz — the story was told pretty straightforwardly, but wasn't very compelling unless you really really care about horses. It was a great example of how poor writing can ruin a perfectly good idea.

Furthermore, I'd venture to say it was the wrong forum for investigative journalism. As much as Examiner.com likes to characterize themselves as made up of citizen journalists, I suspect they probably don't allow their "writers" to post anything negative about businesses. They are not a newspaper, so there would be too much pressure on them to take it down.

My irritation with the article made me realize that to me, poor writing trumps what site you write for. Really, if you want to write for peanuts, that's okay. Whatever. Just don't write like you are writing for peanuts!