One area that many writers struggle with is time.

You sit down at your computer in the morning, and before you know it, you’re working through the night to finish what you should have accomplished during the day.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep your work on track, but there are three strategies that you can use to manage your time effectively.

Cut Down On Email Time
Email is a real time sink. Yes, you need to check to see if writing jobs are coming in, to send out queries and to connect with other writers. However, you don’t have to do this 24 hours a day. This is one area where I still struggle, but I have tried to check email first thing in the morning, at lunch time and in the evening. It’s actually much easier to set aside half an hour to deal with email a couple of times a day than to handle it as it comes in. That’s because it’s easy to get distracted from your writing when you focus on something else. I also turn off my IM client when I’m supposed to be writing.

Plan Your Work
Good planning helps with good writing. I’m not talking about planning the individual pieces of work, but about a programme for how you work. Some people prefer to work on one job at a time until it is done. I prefer to mix and match. If I have a batch of 20 articles on one subject and 10 on another subject, then I will divide them up so I do four a day on one and two a day on the other. Or I mix one job I really enjoy with another that I don’t like as much. It’s a way of keeping my interest going.

Learn To Say No
It’s sometimes tempting to take on too much work when the work is flowing in, but all that happens is that you get stressed and tired. In the long run, overwork makes you less effective. So work out how much work you can do a day, and when you have enough to fill that time, say no to anything else. No doesn’t have to be final. I sometimes say to clients: ‘I’m booked up this week, but I can do your project next week.’ I’ve never lost a job because of it.

These are the methods that have worked for me. I now spend less time working in the evenings and on weekends and more time with my family. And I’m still making money from writing – works for me.

About the author: Sharon Hurley Hall is a born again blogger who has been writing for more than 20 years. She is a freelance writer and ghostwriter who specializes in ebooks, SEO articles and blog posts. Sharon runs the freelance mentoring blog, Get Paid To Write Online.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 5:05 am and is filed under Freelance Writing, Writing White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.