Irons in the Fire

You know that cliche' right?  Well, a freelance writer must, at all times, have several irons in the fire. Time management and project organization are essential skills for the trade.  Often, when I tell people what I do, the responses I hear are things like, "I could never work from home" or "I wouldn't get anything done, there are too many distractions."  Balancing living at home and working at home is a skill that takes practice and commitment.  The very phrase "work-at-home" is a bit of a misnomer for me because I conduct a lot of research and interviews away from my home office.  But, today was one of my 6.5-hour work-at-home shifts and I thought I would share what I did during my shift:

Morning:

• Completed a real estate profile for a newspaper, added cutlines to photos, created an invoice, sent all to editor meeting deadline
• Downloaded photos for the next real estate profile - I toured the property on Sunday afternoon
• Read and responded to work-related emails
• Drafted and sent a query to an international magazine
• Made a phone call to local magazine to follow-up on recently emailed query
• Drafted a short bio to provide to the venue for marketing one of my upcoming writing workshops
• Drafted an article
• Spent about 20 minutes doing online research for two articles

Lunch Break: quick shower, feed and walk dog (studying trees on the walk - research for a work project), eat a snack, get the mail, brew tea

Afternoon:

• Sketched marketing material for an upcoming writing workshop - hence the tree research
• wrote two blog posts
• refined a book outline
• Drafted another article

Note, I did not make any phone calls or send emails not related to my work. I didn't do any housework or run errands. I was not tempted to turn on the television. I truly enjoy the work I do and look forward to my time to research and write.  Marketing is a necessity and I must send several queries a week to editors to provide a steady flow of assignments.  Time management truly is a necessary skill for anyone working from home.