Time… The Moving Finger Writes

Time is one of those things you just can’t get away from.  It just keeps going at one second per second and never stops.  Many of us don’t even think about it until we have a massive project due the next day and we haven’t even started.  It’s not a problem for people with traditional jobs, they have bosses to schedule their work, but for a freelancer things don’t work the same way.

With Labor Day safely behind me, it’s time to start ramping up my freelancing again.  I’ve been working all year, but with the kids home from school I didn’t have as much time to work and so my income dropped off.  But they’re back in school now so I have my time back.

The teens leave for school at about 8:10 in the morning, and my six-year old gets home around 2:45, which gives me about six and a half hours a day to focus on working.  I figure there’s no reason at all why I can’t be productive for at least four or five of those hours.

The only catch is that I’m going to have to do a better job of time management than I’ve been used to over the summer.  The advantage of my light workload was that it was easy to find time to fit my jobs in around things like playing chauffer and listening to the stories my daughter made up.   Once I get busier, it won’t be quite as easy, though I will have to factor in time for kid-based emergencies.

That means I’m going to have to bite the bullet and use time-management software.

Right now I’m looking at using Mozilla Sunbird because I like its standalone nature.

The key is going to be getting started on work bright and early (shortly after the kids leave for school) and also making sure I have time to look for new projects.  Luckily I can probably do a lot of the searching in the afternoon after the kids get home as that doesn’t need the same kind of sustained concentration as paying work.

If any of you have any specific tricks you use, let me know and maybe we can all take advantage of them.