By Ken Walker
After getting a healthy (yet erratic) amount of writing and editing work from a nonprofit foundation during 2022, last year the vice president I worked with agreed to my suggestion of a monthly retainer.
That has been a boon for cash flow. And yet the need to sometimes act on short notice for a proofreading, writing or editing project has also forced me to pay closer attention to daily scheduling and workflow.
At the last in-person PENCON in 2019, I led a workshop on planning my days on a spreadsheet. This practice had helped me boost revenue by 70% over five years. Yet here I am, five years later, sometimes struggling to get a handle on pacing.
I still have the tendency to want to push ahead and get a particular project done so I can check it off my to-do list before moving on. But tunnel vision for the purpose of a bit of mental relief is a bad idea.
I saw that when I started daily scheduling a decade ago. At the time, I was doing more writing than editing. With scheduling, I forced myself to learn to be content with making gradual progress on a variety of projects. Prior to that, I had often devoted huge gulps of time to one task before moving to the next.
Just recently, though, I was struggling to put the cap on a blog for my website. I had allotted one hour for the task, but as sometimes happens, this one wasn’t falling into place.
Aggravated, I started to push ahead and get it done. Then I took my own advice, followed my daily plan, and pushed it aside for the next task. When I came back to it later, an idea of another element I could add made the difference. Blog done.
Another lesson I learned about pacing came courtesy of a friend and fellow freelancer.
Earlier this year he was talking about a new transcription service he had discovered. He mentioned it had come in handy because he was doing a lot of interviews for a ghostwriting project.
My ears perked up because about a year earlier I had ghostwritten a memoir. It proved quite challenging, since it forced me to do a lot of research to fill in gaps in the historical record.
We moved through it slowly too. After an hour on the phone, the author was too tired to go on. Frankly, I was often a bit tired after those sessions, wondering why I couldn’t work any longer.
But my whole outlook changed when my friend talked about his guideline: he sets a one-hour time limit on interviews. Any longer is too much on the author—and him, he said.
His comment helped me relax and be more content with what I can do at a particular time instead of trying to be Superman. Keeping everything on pace will help you keep things in their proper place.
About Ken Walker
Ken Walker is a freelance writer and book editor with more than 4,600 article bylines to his credit. He has coauthored, edited or contributed to more than 90 books. The latest released in late April: a substantive edit of He Still Walks on Water by Gary J. Lewis.