Freelance: Managing workflow and workload

By Jeanne Erdmann

The freelance life offers many perks: no commute, the freedom to adapt your workload to your lifestyle, job security and freelancers can’t get laid off – if you lose one gig, another will come along.

Those advantages are tempered by changing compensation schemes. Now, writers are “paid” in the currency of influence. Platforms such as blogs offer high visibility and perhaps the opportunity to exercise your passion but with less payment than other opportunities.

Freelancers not only need to find, research, and write stories, they need to promote their work on social media, all tasks that are uncompensated financially.

Panelists Maryn McKenna, Paul Raeburn, and Irene Wielawski offered ways to cope with heavy workload of paid and non-paid gigs

Wielawski chooses to focus on the positive aspects of freelancing. More than 15 years ago, she left the investigative team at the Los Angeles Times so she could adapt her workload and the type of work she accepts to her family’s needs, whether it was being around when her children came home from school, to changing her work formula to help pay college tuition, to refusing work that required travel so she could help her ailing mother.

Wielawski urges those who didn’t enter the field voluntarily to take an opportunity “to remember how ‘blissed out’ you were in the newsroom while working with the terrible sense of having an axe over you,” she says.

Raeburn manages his workload by staying focused. Last fall he was juggling writing and non-writing work but he found himself doing too much, missing deadlines, and turning stories in late. So he got rid of the non-writing gigs and now 100 percent of his income comes from writing.

Raeburn urges freelancers to focus, as well, and think about where you want to be in five years. Do you want only gigs that pay well so you have time for other things? Do you want to do the kind of stories that make you more prominent; the kinds of stories that you could submit as awards?

Answering these questions will allow you to help make the decisions of the type of work you’ll seek.

McKenna manages her overstuffed days by obsessively organizing via technology, using such programs as OmniOutliner, DEVONthink and a program that allows her to tag email and go easily from email to a schedule. 

“Everyone I know is under the burden of a heavy workload all the time and is sliding backwards down a long to-do list,” says McKenna.

She advises accepting the reality that each day ends with lots of work not getting done.

Here are 10 practical tips compiled from the session for managing your workload:

1. Schedule everything including writing time, work breaks, and time with your family.

2. Take good care of your “to-do” list. Make a shorter list and consolidate those tasks most urgent. Hang the short list in front of your computer.

3. Make your final task for the evening setting up your desk so you’re ready for the next day.

4. When you schedule time to write allow enough time to finish a section of a draft so that when you finish you feel good and not frustrated.

5. Structure your day around your intellectual metabolism. When do you write the best? When you’ve figured that out keep distractions at a minimum during that time and protect that time. Do not check email or tweet and turn everything off. When do you most need to be by yourself and arrange accordingly.

6. Be candid about the dopamine ping you get when your tweets are retweeted.  Resist neurochemistry, turn off twitter and email when you need to get serious writing done.

7. Think early on about story structure so you will know where the research fits and what’s missing.

8. Keep disciplined about accepting too much work so you don’t burn out.

9. Don’t panic if you have to turn an assignment down. Work comes back.

10. Take care of yourself.

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Jeanne Erdmann is an independent medical science writer based in Wentzville, Mo.