Time after time....

We're a week and a half into the summer here.


I'm not sure about anyone else, but part of the reason I freelance is so that when we get to the holidays, I can take some downtime with my kids - so that there's no holiday problems with care for them, and so that I'm not spending every minute in work wondering whether I'll need to leave early and find they've caused riots.


It does mean, however, that all of the work I'd planned on doing is being is being sandwiched in between episodes of Hannah Montana and Tom and Jerry. It's a nice life, but it's hard to measure the value of the work I'm snatching in. It also means that I've been pushing back and pushing pack things like theme designs and my fiction writing. I got up on Sunday morning though and decided that I needed to stop procrastinating and actually take control!

So, I've written a post over at Publishhacks about the best, and worst freelance tools, in my opinion, for monitoring and supporting any freelance career.


I'm always expanding and testing them though, so I thought I'd find out what your favs and time sinks are.


(so far, I've got Xobini, RescueTime, WordPress, the Internet (wikipedia), The Internet (RSS), Zoundry Raven - some good, some bad ;)) What do you have, and come on over to PublishHacks, to find out about the tools I've mentioned.

Developments and purring like a chain saw

I'm currently in the process of beating my WordPress installs into compliance, because the WordPress from blogger importer isn't working properly on my server. I'm cheating and importing via Wordpress.com - so I've learned, once again, that there's always a circumlocutous way to do something. Let's not get me started on 2.6 beta for WordPress - I'm always vaguely ashamed when I technobabble in communities that aren't techie ;)
Speaking of which...
For the last four years, I've been asking for a cat. Not just any cat, a Bengal. And for years there's always been a reason not to - usually my landlord. When we moved to the new house though, I was told there might be a chance, eventually that we got a cat. And this week we did.
That's Kushie in the photo above, on her first day with us. We got her from the Gloucestershire branch of a wonderful rescue society in the UK, and every day, she does something new to make me smile. Having never kept a cat before, I'm unbearably squeally about her, but more importantly, I'm also feeling rather contented and like the house is actually mine too now. My adorable other half has always wanted a cat, but I've spent the last year and a half feeling like I just...take up a part of the space in the house we moved to, and that till my other half got home, that's all I was doing. Taking up space. My writing has suffered, my confidence has suffered, and due to not writing during the day, and going out more, my bank balance looks kinda pathetic too. A week with my furbaby, and I'm already getting back into writing and editing properly, I'm going out during the day, less, and most of all, I'm comfortable in my house. Awful as it sounds for the time I spent here before.
If you've got a routine that you enjoy/need - and you suddenly find yourself without it, take my advice - try and fix it as soon as possible. This last year and a half has taught me a lot about how effectively I procrastinate - how little I actually use of my writing, and how sad I am when I'm not doing work I enjoy. Between the cat and Uni, my beloved and my kids, this is the first day of the rest of my life, and I'm going to enjoy it!

Hit me with your best shot

Image via Wikipedia
Have you ever been in a position where you've gotten to exactly the point where you can take NO MORE.
No, seriously. One more assignment, problem, project...email and my head is going to explode.
I took the rather drastic action of 'restarting' all of my time management projects.
I bought myself a new piece of software, and I've found that I am actually now 'winning' the war on my email.
It did, of course, also help that I relented and enabled spamassassin on my server, but by and large, I am actually managing to work and write emails in between, instead of emails, and sandwiching work in the spare couple of seconds between it and the next PING.
I've just started a daily blog on how time management works, given I'm suddenly finding I actually have TIME (OMG, does this mean I can't procrastinate and have to finish my books!?) but I was wondering what valuable and important time management, stretching, or downright saving tips you've got.


I bet a couple of you are wondering what the tiger in the picture has to do with all of this? Well - one, its a fabulous photo - but two:
When you give yourself room to stretch or extend - life can hit you with its best shot, and you should be able to go 'and there's time to take care of that HERE' without breaking a sweat. We might all be mothers, and we might all be really busy, being full time *other stuff*, parents, carers, partners and everything else that we do, but it doesn't mean, necessarily that it has to take all of our time to do it. It doesn't mean that just because we're engaging in superhuman feats of time corralling and management that we're not capable of doing it in a way that gives us our own little pockets of time.
Now...if only I could learn to say 'No, I can't, sorry' more often....

Buckling down

Or as my son’s game seems to call it ‘digging in’.

My grandad died a couple of days ago. Such a bald statement to convey every state of grief, guilt, pain, and worry I have, but its all I have to explain it.

Yesterday, we went for a walk – and I was thinking about everything my grandad taught me – he used to grow vegetables and flowers in his garden, and I have many fragmented, flash memories of those beautiful mornings and afternoons, when I was fairly young, running around his garden. Of course, my memories seem to also include fairies at the bottom of his garden, but mom said he used to hide cut-out flower fairies along his fence when I was very small, so that makes sense. Seemingly, he also gave me other things – or at least, he and gran did. Gran died just over 20 years ago, and since the, grandad has been kinda…lost. I understood why, even at 9 and 10, but there was very little I could do. As I grew older, he seemed to pull away – whether I reminded him, a bit of gran, or because we all grew a bit distant when I hit my teens, I’ll never know, but by the time I started a family of my own, I wasn’t seeing him much. And I feel sad about that. Its funny – we never think they’ll leave us, that we’ll have ‘tomorrow’ to fix it all – to say all of the things we want to say. Tomorrow is an excuse. It might sound harsh, but I always said ‘I’ll call tomorrow’ and never do. I always say ‘I’ll write tomorrow’ and get through my Uni work, and then go and goof off. I always say ‘It can wait’. Friday night made me realise that some things just can’t wait.

Yesterday, I was fairly subdued. My partner has never met my grandad – and now, I realize, he never will – so we went for a walk, and on our way back, on my door step, I found a spouting conker. I know it wasn’t there when we left, and we have a walled garden, so goodness knows how it got there.

Now, though I have a conker tree in my front yard called Bill. After my grandad. For the happy memories.

I stopped writing though, for anything other than university, about six weeks ago, and today, I’m going to try buckling down. I’m not sure whether I ‘believe’ in writers block, personally (though, yes, I believe others can ‘have’ it) but I know something is stopping some of my writing. I’m going to try to bulldoze it first before anything else. I’m hoping, like the tree I planted for my grandad, I can make something of my life, and honour him, and the rest of my family for all of the things they invested in me.

Five tips for the perpetually disorganised

(x-posted from my blog, Publish Hacks)
I promised I'd be back when my brain reconstituted slightly.
And so....without further ado.
The five top tips for the perpetually disorganized (cue chart count-down music)

In at number five - Make a to-do list - It might seem odd, but you're not going to be able get organized and plan your time without looking into what you've got to do. So, work out what you've got to work with, and then you can handle the rest more effectively.

At four - close your email. If, like me, you live in your email, you'll find your time is more effectively managed if you close the time sink that is your email. Not only do we focus less well on working if you're looking at your system tray for the little envelope every five minutes, but when it does come in, you then feel nagged, and may *have* to open it. Have a routine for checking email, even if its once an hour (but at the same time, if you're really in a flow at that point, don't break it)

At three - remember that if you're procrastinating, there's a reason for it. If you're ALWAYS procrastinating, perhaps you need to look at your practices, and find out why. Writing is everyone's passion, and yes, we all have to make money from it, but if you really hate what you're doing, maybe you need to look for something you hate less ;).

At two - remember that your todo list is a guideline, not a structure. As long as you're fulfilling your deadlines, don't sweat the small stuff. Similarly, if you're NOT completing your deadlines, you need to look at why. I'm very undisciplined, and I know that's what my main problem stems from, so I've built and designed my working patterns around that. But I don't break off when things are really going well either. If I get into the flow, I ride it out, and find a way to catch up later.

And at number one - make sure you've got the right tools for the right job. I'm currently trialling some low cost software that's supposedly great for people like me. It stores everything in the one place, so I can access whatever I need to with a couple of clicks, within the place I write - and is helping me see exactly where I need to go from here.
You don't NEED to buy software though - there are lots of free tools that you can use (in fact, I review them on my blog), its all a question of comfort.

BONUS tip!
Have FUN! Its one of the most important caveats of writing. We're not writing because we have to, we're writing because we love it. It might be hard, and yes, its frustrating, but at the end of the day, isn't it worth it?