What does your work day look like at 1:15 pm? Here’s what it could look like if you were a freelance writer.
At 1:12 pm, the BabyBoy came up and said “Daddy! It’s hammock time!” Because that wasn’t a phone call into my office at a regular job-type-job I got to say “Darn straight it’s hammock time!”
I love my hammock time, and so do all the other freelancers I know. For some, “hammock time” is working in the garden. For others, it’s having time to hit the gym or go climb a rock. However you choose to celebrate your control over how you spend your days, it’s one of the best parts of the freelance writing life. It’s also important to succeeding as a freelancer. Here’s why.
1. Connecting With Freelance Mission
Freelance writing jobs are hard. You have to take responsibility for so many things, with nobody there to guide you when you don’t know what to do next. Your hammock time puts you with the reasons you take on that extra work and worry. It helps you power through when the job gets tough.
2. Sharpening the Saw
Hammock time regenerates you as efficiently as a good night’s sleep. By building some slack into your schedule and taking time to pause and reflect, you make yourself a better freelance writer. That means becoming more efficient and profitable…which means more hammock time.
3. Tapping Your Freelance Writing Pencil
A mentor of mine, Dave Kovar, advises to take minutes each day to “tap your pencil” — to make time for letting your mind wander. It’s the best prescription I’ve seen for solving complex problems, imagining plot lines, and finding new opportunities to grow your business and as a person. Hammock time creates occupies your thinking brain with one activity while freeing the rest of your mind to tap that pencil.
What’s your hammock time? Besides actually spending time in a hammock, mine includes practicing martial arts, travel and playing table-top games. Sound off in the comments.
My Hammock Time used to be Cabin Time until we got internet access out there. But last winter my husband hauled a wood-fired hot tub in on the snowmobile. Now I have Hot Tub Time~can’t take a cell phone or a laptop in there!
Well….you can…it’s just a really bad idea.
It seems to me, and I think you’d probably agtee, that this “Hammock Time” philosophy applys well to almost any kind of freelance or work-from-home type of job. It’s something that I really dig about your site and advice: while you’re applying it specifically to professional writers the same holds true for many other types of work. For instance, your piece on attending conferences and the six mistakes you can make in attending them. These are good pieces of advice for any professional conference. The web development indusrty (and indeed programming in general) have conferences all the time. People attend them for the same reasons, and your advice is a perfect fit for them ad well.