Do You Have The Multitasker Gene?

I'm a good multitasker. I've always been good at juggling things and I feel I do my best work when there's a little bit of stress. There's a fine balance between adrenaline and chaos though so I have to be careful I don't go from multitasker to stress monster otherwise it ain't pretty. If you don't have a multitasking personality, you can learn the trait and if you want to manage your career well, you will need to learn to multi-task at least a little. But you can't go overboard or you'll get writer's ADHD.

Balancing Between Self and Work in Writing

I'm trying to balance between working for others and working for myself. I try to devote a bit of time each day to updating a few of my many blogs or doing something to do with SEO for some my sites. As well, I try to work regularly to raise my online profile.

Networking with others helps in many ways too for self, for career and for productivity. It is tricky to do it all and not suffer loss of productivity.

The Multi-Tasking Double-Edged Sword

If you don't do enough self-promotion and networking the opportunities can dry up and your earnings can hit a ceiling. If you do too much multitasking, your to-do list will be too long and you can lose focus and you'll never get any work done.

How does a writer manage a wah ghostwriting career, a family and improve their life ?

For me, I try to find balance. I make a weekly schedule that I try to stick to or at least prioritize.

1. Paying work comes first. Gotta pay the bills.
2. Blogging or affiliate marketing comes second because it raises my income.
3. Social marketing and SEO come third.(Although blogging and affiliate marketing also help with my SEO in many ways so are essential for helping me do both number one and number two.)

I was asked how I keep up with it all when I mentioned I was starting a new personal finance blog. I already have 9 registered domains and a whole bunch of hosted blogs as well so it's tricky and sometimes I have to rein myself in a little. I had a great idea for a blog and registered it 2 months ago but haven't done anything yet with it. I registered another new domain yesterday and will probably not start on it immediately. I am not trying to put too many frying pans into the fire. Instead I'm getting little seeds planted and I can do a bit of gardening when I have down time.

How do I manage it? I have a WIP (work in progress) folder for my own work. I put ideas here, potential blog titles or I start side projects that I can tackle later. I have to maximise my productivity so my tips for balance are this:

-Schedule time for paying work
-Schedule time for your own stuff
-Schedule time for play
-Be flexible...flexibility is, afterall, why you decided to work from home.

Right? Write! :)

Figuring Out The Best Time To Do Your Writing Work

This morning I read a post by Problogger about doing tasks in batches and what he said made a lot of sense. I also had a light bulb moment shortly afterwards.

I recently wrote about my batching my freelance writing admin work on Sundays so I keep on top of my books and have a lighter day in the week. I was already doing a few things Darren talked about but he goes a step further than I and some of his tips make a lot of sense to me.

Darren's advice includes the fact that instead of writing a blog post once a day you might choose to spend one morning a week writing out the posts for the whole week and post-dating them. Instead of checking e-mail every five minutes, you might pick a few times a day to handle tasks like e-mailing and responding to instant messages. Great advice, Darren Rowse! I've often written about multitasking and how it can actually harm your productivity if you end up with Writer's ADHD.

Beyond benefits of batch processing and productivity traps I'm also learning that there are times when I'm better equipped to be successful.

This morning I had to do something I normally do every Thursday night for a client. It was an enlightening experience. This task involves writing several articles and then submitting them to nine online locations. It involves a lot of cutting and pasting and tweaking. I've tweaked my methods for this task several times and have found ways of cutting the submission times but it never fails to become arduous for me.

I love the subject matter and enjoy writing the articles but every single Thursday night you'll find me at my computer and probably with a grumpy face. I toil with the cutting and pasting. It feels like it takes forever and the result is that I'm often making silly errors like pasting the keywords for one subject into the section of the other one and making mistakes in signature lines that result in broken links. I always go back to make sure I haven't made errors but it takes ages to finish the task. I always feel exhausted at 11:pm or 12:am on Thursday nights getting this done. Because I don't love the submission process, I procrastinate until literally the 11th hour. I've decided I'm now going to do this task on Thursday mornings.

This Thursday I was zonked from another assignment so my client told me I could finish later so I planned to do it Friday night instead. Late last night when I planned to do it, I got turfed off my pc early due to a thunder storm so I did my submissions this morning. This morning I was bright-eyed and bushy tailed and I think I cut the submission time in half and they were error free the first time I did them. Valuable lesson learned!

Not only is batch processing a great idea from an organizational perspective but figuring out when you are at your best for certain tasks could increase productivity and result in more polished and error-free work.