Christopher Hamilton

Image by Dru Bloomfield

I briefly touched on my schedule now that I’m self employed in my previous post. At the time I said I was happy to leave it fluid and open to change while I learned more about how I wanted to spend my days, and after a few weeks I think I’m starting to nail down what works for me.

Finding my Creative Peaks

The first thing I set out to discover was exactly when I’m at my most creative throughout the day. With that knowledge I could begin to shape my day around those peaks so that I would be doing my best writing for clients, and for myself.

I’ve made myself sit down at different times during the day to try and write something. While I was able to write at every point I discovered that mornings are not my friend, creatively speaking. Whereas afternoons and evenings were perfectly fine. I tried writing client work, writing for myself, even writing pitch emails, and while everything I sat down to write was completed, all of them were more difficult in the morning. It began to bother me, so I tried to figure out why that was the case.

After thinking about it for a while, I believe I’ve figured out the root problem with my creativity in the morning. After 15 years in the IT industry where mornings are more often than not spent running through daily checklists and system monitoring, it’s no wonder my creative energy is low before 11am. In the mornings of an IT career you check the previous evenings backups; you check all the servers are behaving and none of them had problems through the night, as well as lots of other little things, but you never really need to deviate from a set routine unless there’s a problem. Even then the problems you experience tend to all be the same so you then step into another routine to deal with them. There is virtually no creative spark in the mornings of an IT career, they are instead filled with simple monotonous administration.

Once I realised that my old routine was still playing havoc with my new career, I decided to make it work for me, rather than against me. Now rather than try to write anything in the morning I do research for that day’s writing instead. Or I carry out administrative tasks like my accounts, blog/website maintenance, or going through analytics data. They are all important tasks that I need to do so I get them out of the way first thing. Which then leaves my afternoons and early evenings free to write. I’m sure as my previous career falls further behind me my mornings will get easier, but for now I’m going to make use of them in any way I can.

Creating the Schedule

For the first few weeks of my new career there was no real structure to any of my days. I would work on things when I felt like it, and that sometimes meant doing things a little too close to their deadline. So now that I know that any actual writing is better if done in the afternoon I needed to build a schedule around that to bring order to my days.

I very quickly made a decision that for some tasks, rather than spread them out through the week I wanted to spend one day getting them done. For example, I’ve scheduled in Monday’s for building lists of potential clients that I would like to work with, as well as marketing myself. That doesn’t mean that I only do those things on a Monday, but they are my primary tasks for that day. Two of the three important items on my to do list for Monday’s are now always to find a set number of potential clients, and to market myself in some respect. The third item changes depending on what needs to be done, which does allow for some flexibility in my day.

I have days that I’ve set aside to write for specific clients now, and I’m working on a set schedule to write posts here. I’ve also set aside time in my schedule to do something creative that isn’t work related, whether that’s to write some fiction, continue the slow process of teaching myself to draw, pick up the guitar and learn a new song, or to take my camera out and start a new photo project. I believe that just doing something for the sake of being creative is going to be a huge benefit to both my life and career in the future.

I’m also breaking my day down into regular blocks of time and setting myself tasks for each of those blocks. It’s working just now, but I want to streamline it further and really improve the way I work. It’s all still a work in progress and will definitely change as I develop as a writer and my workload grows. For the moment, it keeps me focused on my goals and keeps me from the evil clutches of procrastination.

Are you a freelancer? If you are, let me know how you manage your time in the comments or by email if you’d rather it wasn’t public. I’m really interested in finding out what works for other people so that it might help me improve my own time management in the future.

Photo by stonethestone

All of my adult life I have been an employee. I’ve struggled against the constraints that entails and grew more determined to be in control of my own time and my undertake whatever projects I wanted to without having to get someone’s approval. At the end of last year I resigned from my comfortable and “safe” IT industry day job with the intention of writing for a living, and allowing my creativity to be the driving force in my career. I’ve been writing on the side for a while but the day job was always there sapping my energy and taking up the most productive times in my day. Now, I’ve finally worked my notice, and for the first time in my life I am completely and utterly relying on myself in order to make a living.

Taking A Much Needed Break

I finished up the day job at the end of February and rather than jump straight into the new writing career full time I knew that I needed a chance to relax and let that old stress melt away. I’d been carrying a lot of mental baggage from the day job for a long time and I knew that when I had annual leave from the office it would take me at least a week to get to a point where I was honestly relaxed, but then I would end up having to go back into the office and the stress would rebuild itself very quickly. So with that in mind I decided to take a holiday, and visit friends in Madrid for a few days. It was probably the best thing I could have done. As well as spending time with great friends I thought about nothing other than enjoying myself and relaxing while I was there. Then when I got home, I took the remainder of the week to let everything from the old job just dissipate from my mind. I didn’t think about IT problems or even the new career. I took a complete break and separated my old life from my new one. I needed to start this new journey with a clear mind, and those extra days helped me achieve that.

The New Adventure

Being self employed, while so far is fantastic, brings with it new concerns that I’ve never had to face before. Simple things such as doing my own taxes and finding clients, is completely foreign to me but brings with them a challenge that excites me. Not to mention the fact that writing for a living after working in the IT industry requires quite a dramatic change in mindset. I used to have to decompress at the end of a working day and then try to get into the frame of mind where I could write and be creative, but now I don’t have to worry about that change in mentality and until this week I never realised how exhausting that mental change had become. It has also let me think about a few projects that I’ve talked about for a long time but never had the time or energy to really get going.

I’ve spent this week so far thinking about what I really wanted to do with my time, rather than what I no longer wanted to do – which is harder than it sounds – and to begin the process of finding clients that fit into that vision. I’ve also had to adjust to having no set schedule and being free to work on whatever I choose whenever and wherever I choose to. So far my days have started a little later than they used to but have gone on later than before simply because I’m enjoying what I’m doing now. That schedule may just be a temporary thing while I get used to the fact that I don’t have to trudge into an office for 9am. For the moment I’m content to let the schedule remain a fluid as long as I get done what I need to. Though I expect that in the next week or two I’ll nail down a proper schedule that works for me and allows me to tap into when I’m most productive during the day.

Having this fluid schedule has made me realise that my to-do list is going to be very important to getting things done. Before going to bed I’ve started creating a list of three important things I need to achieve the following day. It means I’m not floundering around at the start of my day wondering what I should do, and it gives me a little structure to keep me going until I get used to completely controlling my own time.

It’s still early days in the new career. I need to find more clients, and I need to figure out the best way to manage my own time. With all of that I wish I’d made this leap sooner, but right now I’m so happy I finally made the decision to leave the day job behind. I’m more relaxed, and I’m starting to feel like myself again now that all the stress has gone, and that can only lead to great things in the future.