Image credit: Hans Thoursie

Martin Luther King Day is an important holiday as well as a school holiday. I had planned to complete my usual work activities. Instead, I spent the entire morning working on one story and didn’t finish it. Writing the story felt clunky, awkward and pointless despite my knowing first drafts were supposed to be like that. Even though the kids weren’t loud or disruptive, the setting was different from my daily work environment.

Panicking

It’s a scary situation because I feel like “I’ve lost it. I’m not going to be able to work the next day.” No matter what I told myself about the day being different, nothing comforted me. I couldn’t check off one thing on my task list; a nightmare for me.

Tuesday came. I fell right back into my routine. My fingers flew as I threw up words on my screen to create a few new articles. I checked a few things off my work tasks for the day. I felt in the zone and full of satisfaction. It was as if Monday had never happened.

This happens on holidays and days of personal appointments. The cruel cycle repeats. Can’t work or focus. Panic. Guilt. Next day arrives. Back to normal.

Even though my mental state would not listen to me and learn from the past, one thing is clear: Schedules make a difference.

Scheduling Activities to Create New Habits

I start my day with email, Twitter and blogging. Thanks to this habit, I rarely write a new blog entry in the afternoon. I exercise after 11:00am on most days. Sometimes it’s 11:30am. Sometimes it’s 1:00pm. 1:30pm at the latest. Whatever the time, it’s still a habit because it’s the mid-day / early afternoon time. Most of the writing I do occurs before mid-day with the afternoons devoted to research, revising and other activities not related to starting from scratch.

I check in with social media a few times a day with the bulk of it occurring in the morning and evening. To make the most of my social media time without falling into the trap sticking around too long, I created a habit to check in for a few minutes and get out. I also figured out how much time I should spend in social media.

Since I do my best writing and focus in the morning, it works well. By the time the younger kids come home, I take a break, give them snacks, spend time with them and help with homework. If I had been more of a night person, I would have to work on creating a new habit. According to various discussions and books, it takes 21 days to develop a new habit.

I’ve also kept the same bedtime and wake up time for years, which ensures a good night’s sleep. I stray from the routine once in a while and it’s never for more than a couple of days in a row.

Habits Help Focus

Because I had the habit of working in a quiet home office with no TV, people noises and other disruptions, I could not focus when the kids had a day off from school.

Bet you’re wondering how I handle this in the summer when the kids have a long break from school. Habit. Summer has longer days, so it’s easier to work in the evenings after my husband comes home. I also schedule a few activities for the kids including visits with Grandma.

Christina Katz shares how she refocused. I did a review of my work and didn’t need to consolidate, streamline or refocus. For some, just the act of writing and brainstorming on pen and paper helps focus. Sometimes this works for me, too. But the best medicine for focus for me is schedule.

How do you focus?

Karen Putz asks how I do it — balance full-time writing and being a parent to three kids. I should be asking her how she does it — she interviews Marlee Matlin!

As I mentioned in my how I became a writer story, the whole thing started as a part-time venture while managing a part-time corporate job (for most of it) and three kids. I believe writing on the side while holding down a corporate job is a better route than chucking it all for the freelance life.

Yes, life is about risks, but you’re more likely to succeed by building up instead of starting with zip. Had I chucked it all back in 2000, I would’ve had less than a part-time amount of work and no health benefits. My spouse got laid off in 2003, right before #3 came along. We would’ve been in deep trouble had I chucked, which would’ve been more of an upchuck (holds back from the woodchuck routine).

I also volunteer and sit on several PTA boards. My mom was a full-time volunteer for the second half of my childhood. I wanted to be like her. Living a balanced life is important to me. My kids will grow up, so I need to enjoy them NOW.

Prefer to be all about your career? You might want to read Wake Up, Damn It! If your career makes you happy, then go for it and ignore everything here.

So how do I manage all of this? Not without a little insanity and stress at times, but these tips help make it easier:

1. Enroll younger kids in pre-school. Keeping them at home isn’t doable (unless you have a nanny). My youngest has learned amazing stuff he would never have learned had he stayed home. He enters kindergarten in the fall (sob).
2. Rely on a personal information manager complete with contacts, calendar, and to do lists. The Palm desktop has been my trusty sidekick since 1995. Use Outlook. Use any of the many online web-based applications.
3. Balance your schedule for the week. Non-work appointments take too many of my slots this week. I’ve rescheduled two. I try to spread out appointments, but that doesn’t always work and find a week becomes overloaded. So when I realize it, I start moving things around where I can. I review the week ahead sometime between Friday and Monday to ensure balance or to do something about it.
4. Accept working off hours. While I work a standard work week, appointments and kid events can cut into my work time. So I make it up in the evening or on weekends, but never at the sacrifice of sleep bring us to the next point…
5. Get sleep. Everyone requires a different amount of sleep to function well. If I stay up late working on something, I’m hurting more than helping my clients and business. While I might get something done late at night, I’m useless the next day and lose an entire day. So better to sleep and finish in the morning.
6. Avoid waiting until last minute to do work to make deadline. To avoid late nights, I make sure I have room to meet the deadline. This prevents racing the clock or sacrificing quality to make a deadline.
7. Make “No” part of your vocabulary. Or else, get stuck with deadlines close to each other, overload your schedule, and turn yourself into a stress machine (which affects your health). I believe, “When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” So parents, it may feel selfish to say, “No,” but your family benefits.
8. Drop stressful clients. I’ve dropped a client or two because I didn’t enjoy the work and dreaded working on their projects. Add these together spells energy drain. Worried about replacing them? Writers should always include marketing a part of their job.
9. Balance your kids’ activities. Who says they need to take music lessons, play sports, dance, and do scouts all at once? Kids need a break, too. Try to limit younger ones’ — who are trying things to find what they like — current activities to one or two. When one ends, you can try something else. After all, fewer activities means fewer chauffeuring jobs for parents.
10. Use your “I can’t write now” time wisely. When we find ourselves unable to write or work, we can easily fall into the trap of needlessly surfing the Web or doing other wasteful activities. When I’m in a stupor, I fold laundry, exercise, play games (that I need to review) — Things that benefit me.

How do you balance your writing life with your personal life?

Frustration builds while reviewing this week’s calendar. Every day this week has something not routine and not work-related scheduled (and most of last week, too). I can only reschedule one appointment, but it’s not enough to lighten the load.

So what does a lone freelancer do? To prevent myself from going crazy and sacrificing sleep (if I do this, then I might as well mark myself as unavailable for the entire day after a short night’s sleep), I work through my fewer hours than usual:

• Cancel or reschedule appointments, if possible.
• Prioritize (Duh!)
• Contact regular clients notifying them of my reduced availability.
• Cut time spent on self-assigned work like blogging, Twittering, and social network sites. While these sound like time wasters — they aren’t. It’s part of the freelancer’s marketing toolbox.
• Be strict about fooling around on the Internet (This is the time waster.).

Even with deadlines, the freelancer should be able to plan the week to meet them while saving less urgent work for later. Most of the time, the freelancer meets the deadlines and then has time left over to work on the lower prioritized stuff.

I feel better knowing I will accomplish a few things this week, though less than usual. It’s better than panicking and getting nothing done.

Many of us ask how we can find more time in our busy days or if we can add another hour to the 24 hour clock. Well, the 25 hour thing won’t happen anytime soon, so the best we can do is look at our current schedule and chop time there as Lifehack gives 21 ideas for adding more hours in the day. I won’t rehash the list and instead share my experiences. Three kids, a spouse, my business and volunteering forces a girl to be wise with her time.

1. TV – My TV viewing habits differ from my kids’, but they’re not learning from my actions. I don’t just watch whatever is on TV and whittle away my free time. I select shows I enjoy and tape them for viewing at my convenience, not the network’s. I still have shows from April that I’ve yet to watch. I usually watch them while doing laundry or exercising as both have to be done.

2. Internet – One thing I rarely do — get my news from the Internet. I read the newspaper every morning, which has a start and end point. Reading news on the Internet could go on and on. If something happens during the day, then I’ll look online.

3. Games – Thank goodness I have the opportunity to review games. I hardly ever played games because of my busy schedule. When Mark Wegner asked if I would review games for him — he created a monster as I review for Gamezebo, too. To avoid temptation of getting carried away with an addicting game, I load them on the laptop not my work computer. Now instead of cutting into my work time, games sometimes cut into my sleeping time.

4. E-mail – This is one of my worst habits. However, I’ll get wrapped up in a project and not think about checking e-mail for a while (which is more like an hour, not half a day).

5. Chores – Well, I’ve put organizing systems in place, but I run into a problem that’s hard to control — the rest of the household. No one cares about organization like I do — not even the spouse.

6. Listening to books – I wish I could do this as I think it’s a marvelous way to multitask while riding in the car or stuck in the waiting room. I carry a book or a PDA with me at all times, so I can read or use an application on the PDA that I’m reviewing whenever stuck someplace.

7. Prioritize – Focus on getting higher priority items or those with a nearing deadline done before the rest. Even those with a deadline about a month away — plan ahead for those. For example, I’m judging many PDA-based applications for Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine awards for all of August. Prioritizing means looking at how much I need to review and the time left. It would be unwise to wait until a week before the deadline to start reviewing. If I do this, it’d require spending all of my time on reviewing when I still have to get client work done. So I planned ahead and do a little each day.

What do you do to help make the most of your time?