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Getting stuff done is crucial to succeeding as a freelancer: you need to earn money, and you need to meet your deadlines. Productivity is a very personal thing, and it’s a topic I think about a lot. Even when you love your job (which I do!):

• You still have to do things you don’t love, or even things that you hate (hello, accounting)
• It’s always great to earn more, in less time, by working more efficiently
• Thinking about productivity can teach you a lot about how your brain works, which in turn can help you in other areas of life

Step one: A couple of excellent resources

When it comes to productivity, and lots of other things in life, we rarely ask the question: Why? Why do I put off certain tasks? Why do certain tasks feel really easy? Why do I feel really motivated to do some things, and I dread or avoid others? Here are two resources to start with, when you’re trying to answer those questions:

1. Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies personality framework. I am really, really not a personality test kind of person. Myers-Briggs…ugh. But I really love the Four Tendencies framework, because it helps you understand why you (and other people) do (or don’t do) the things you do (or don’t do). You’re identified as one of four types: Upholder, Rebel, Questioner, or Obliger, and I have honestly found this whole concept so helpful. I’m an Upholder: if you tell me to do something, I’m going to do it, and if I tell myself to do something, I’m going to do it; I also struggle to find joy or meaning in activities that don’t have an outcome or a purpose, I have trouble letting go of something I’ve committed to doing, even if I no longer want to do it, and I tend to have little patience with people who can’t just “get it done.” Every type has its advantages and disadvantages; I highly recommend figuring out what type you are, before diving into any productivity initiative!
2. Dorothee Racette’s blog, Take Back My Day. Dorothee is a German<>English translator and past ATA President turned productivity coach, and her stuff is also super-helpful. She really digs into the question of Why: Why procrastination is about managing your perspective, not managing time, Why freelancers with ADHD may not benefit from standard productivity advice, and more. Check out her materials if you haven’t already (not an affiliate deal!).

Six productivity strategies to try

As mentioned above, hitting the productivity sweet spot depends on a lot on how your brain works. Start there! After that, here are six things I’d recommend trying:

1. Swallow the frog. Do the least appealing task first. Sometimes, I boost this strategy by depriving myself of coffee until I do the dreaded thing. At least 98.5% of the time, I’ve spent more time avoiding the task than it actually takes to do it. I’m particularly avoidant about accounting and tax tasks, so I implement this strategy for those types of things.
2. Bribe yourself. If you market to one new client every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, then on Friday, you get to go to your favorite café as soon as you’re done with work.
3. Sprint. Whether it’s a power hour or a 25-minute Pomodoro, this technique really helps me. Something about the defined period of time makes it less intimidating.
4. Go all-in, for a set number of days. This is kind of the underlying concept of any challenge group: you don’t have to keep up with the habit forever, but by ingraining it for something like 30 days, you’ll probably stick with it in some capacity even after the group is done. Setting a really ambitious goal that you only have to stick with for 30 days can be great, because you can pick something you’d never stick with otherwise. For example, market to five clients every weekday (25 clients in one month…probably more than you did in all of last year!).
5. Outsource judiciously. Hiring an accountant and a website manager frees me up to earn money doing what I’m good at, so that I can pay them to do what they’re good at. Don’t think of this purely in terms of hourly rate (my accountant charges a lot more than I do!), think of it in terms of how many hours it would take for you to do what they do. In the case of accounting, I’m probably 3-4x slower than my accountant, and I hate the work!
6. Identify your highest and lowest-energy times of the day or week and, to whatever extent you can, work around them. I am honestly neither a morning person nor a night person (I just love to sleep!), but I find it almost impossible to work on cognitively intensive work at night. If work bleeds over into the evening, I try to save the least intensive work for the evening. Some people’s “golden hour” is Sunday afternoons; for some, it’s 5 AM. Capitalize on that as much as you can.

Finally: a bonus mindset tip. A while ago, I heard a really great interview with Mark McGuinness, the author of Productivity for Creative People. I don’t actually consider myself very creative, but I loved his key point: think of productivity (with the tasks you don’t love: accounting, marketing, answering non-critical e-mail, cleaning off your desk, IT maintenance) as what frees you up to spend as much time as possible on the things you do love. I really liked that!

I hope these tips are helpful in your own productivity efforts! Have a great week!

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Nudging dormant clients is the world’s most boring, and the world’s most effective marketing method. In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What nudging is
• Who to nudge
• How to nudge
• When to nudge
• What to say when you nudge

Listen (Training for Translators) in Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, or right here!

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Direct client marketing launch pad starts on Monday, November 4. It’s a four-week, self-paced class (you don’t need to be online at a specific time), registration is $195 (ATA members, use coupon code ATA for $30 off), and you have access to the course materials for six months. This course is for you, if you’re thinking:

• I’d like to work with direct clients, but I have no idea who might need me, or how to contact them
• I think about working with direct clients, but it seems so overwhelming, and I get stuck before I even start
• I see some direct clients who could use my services, but I don’t know what to say when I contact them

This is a “from the ground up” course, and we do weekly recorded question and answer sessions so that you can get all of your questions answered! Full description here!

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This week’s Training for Translators podcast episode is not based on a past blog post, it’s a podcast about how I make my podcast! I wanted to document this:

• In case you’re interested in making your own podcast
• In case you’re curious about how podcasts get made
• For my own reference, so I remember the process!

In this episode, I discuss how I record, edit, and host the podcast, where I found the intro/outro voiceover team, and the technological skills that I learned along the way. You can listen to Training for Translators in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or using the audio player below.

Although my friend and colleague Eve Bodeux and I hosted Speaking of Translation for 13 years (seriously!!), the technology has changed a lot, and my own audio quality standards have increased since I’ve been doing more interpreting.

Like Speaking of Translation, Training for Translators is hosted on Libsyn (the $7/month plan works for me, so far). The big difference is that I learned how to record and edit in Audacity, and I purchased a Shure MV7+ microphone. I originally planned to take a class in how to use Audacity, but there are so many great YouTube tutorials that I ended up just watching a couple of those (just go on YouTube and search for “Audacity basics”). Then I did Audacity’s own tutorial on mixing narration with background music. Details in the episode!

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Burnout (feeling like you resent your job, you don’t want to do your job anymore, you’re too exhausted to do your job, etc.) can be a big issue for freelancers. While we don’t have bosses chaining us to our desks, we have the reality that, the more you work, the more you earn, and you don’t get paid if you don’t work. This can lead to phenomena such as:

• Constantly working excessively long hours, “perpetual overtime” mode where a 60-hour week, or working every weekend, starts to feel normal
• Never taking time off, because we fear that we can’t afford to, or we fear losing clients if we’re ever unavailable
• Turning down or cancelling plans with family and friends, because we’re always working
• Having no time for non-work interests, because we “don’t have time”

Let’s break this down a bit!

Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, or it’s the best of a few not-great options

I don’t meant this in a negative way, it’s just true. Generally, I love my job, and I really enjoy working. However, for a few years when my daughter was little (approximately ages two to six), I deemed it preferable to consistently work at night, rather than putting her in full-time child care. She would go to preschool or kindergarten in the morning, then I would spend the afternoons with her, have dinner with her and my husband, and then work from about 7:30-11 PM, often six nights a week. This was not fun. I’m not a night person. TBH I’m not really a morning person either, I just sleep a lot. During that phase of life, I also (TBH) cried a lot because I was so tired, and felt so torn between the stable life I wanted for my daughter, and the career that I wanted for myself. And by the way, my husband is fantastic; he’s a great dad and a very supportive partner. It’s just the reality that in the U.S., child care is incredibly expensive, we were living off pretty moderate incomes, and it felt like the better choice for me to inconvenience myself.

Looking back, I honestly wouldn’t do things differently. Now that my daughter is 22 (!!), I feel grateful to have had the time with her, while developing my business. I’m glad that I never stopped working completely, and I’m glad that I was there for all of the important moments of her childhood. Moral: sometimes overwork and burnout just is what it is, and the only way through it is through it.

Ten things that help me avoid burnout

1. Charging rates that allow me to bill (not work, bill: generate income) around 25 hours a week. This sounds like a weird tip for avoiding burnout, but I think it’s critical. If you have to generate income 40 or 50 hours a week in order to reach your target income, you’re going to be working a lot more hours than that, because clients don’t pay you to do administrative work, issue invoices, market, attend conferences, work on your website, maintain your computer, or anything else besides translation and interpreting. Personally, I think 25-30 hours of billable work is good. More than that, and you’re running two risks: either you’re not spending enough time on non-billable work to keep your business healthy, or you’re working too much. And if you’re, like, what is this whole billable hours thing, fill out my Deciding what to charge spreadsheet!
2. Compartmentalizing my work and non-work time. I find it hugely draining to have work bleeding into personal time, and personal time bleeding into work. I’m very bad at setting this boundary, so I’ve worked at an office outside my house (first, a series of co-working offices; now, my own office) for around 10 years.
3. Actively seeking out work that I enjoy and am good at. I think people burn out for two reasons: mostly because they just work too much, but also because they constantly do work that they don’t enjoy. This leads to my next point:
4. NOT working on “whatever lands in the inbox.” To me, one of the root causes of burnout is a lack of fulfillment, a feeling that what you’re doing doesn’t really matter, it’s tedious, it’s not meaningful, etc. If you’re feeling like this, go back to step three, actively seeking out work that you enjoy and are good at.
5. Spending less than I earn, and maintaining a business and personal savings cushion. Again, a perhaps seemingly unrelated tip, but I think it’s really important. Financial desperation isn’t a great catalyst for good business decisions; you really want to be working today to pay the bills that are due in three months or six months, not next week. The corollary to this is always spending less than you make (my first job out of college, I earned $700 a month plus free room and board, and I still saved money), something I wrote about in this post. 
6. Making strategic decisions about when to work overtime. Note here that I’m not saying, “Never working nights or weekends.” Sometimes, I do work nights or weekends, but I make a deliberate decision to do that, I don’t do it by default. For example, I have an interpreting client for whom I work ongoing sessions of online courses, which once in a while meet on weekends; I deem this worthwhile. Likewise, I have a law firm client who pays very well and sometimes needs rush work; also worthwhile.
7. Taking real vacations. As a freelancer, vacations can be kind of amorphous. I really love the ability to work from anywhere, and part of the point of a real vacation is to disconnect. I try to take one completely computer-free week twice a year: generally one week around Christmas and one week in August. This has actually gotten easier since I’ve been doing more interpreting, because conference interpreting really slows down at those times. Then, I typically take around four additional weeks of vacation, where I might work for an hour or two in the evening, work on the airplane, etc. Which leads me to my next point…
8. Maintaining a paid vacation fund. I think that a business savings account is really important, for a few reasons. Unexpected tax bill (this happened to me in 2023, when I “made too much money,” a concept I only think about when I talk to my accountant!), dead computer, can’t-miss conference…and paid vacation! Budgeting so that you can still pay yourself for a couple of weeks while you don’t work can really help push you out the door for some much-needed vacation.
9. Viewing myself as a non-renewable resource. Rebounding from burnout takes a long time, and burnout itself can have serious repercussions in your business. It’s better not to empty the tank completely; when you feel yourself on a quarter of a tank of energy, that’s the time to take some burnout-prevention actions. Which leads me to my next point…
10. Being a really great boss (of myself). My husband has a salaried job, and he has an excellent boss. When she sees that the team is really tired, she’ll cancel a meeting and tell everyone to log off a few hours early. She sends out Starbucks gift cards. She notices who deserves a raise or a promotion. And honestly, that’s the way I try to treat myself. I’ve been doing a lot of interpreting assignments on East Coast time, meaning that I have to get up around 5 AM, and yesterday I decided to leave work at 1 PM and go to yoga. The instructor said, “I never see you here at this time of day!” to which I responded, “My boss said I’ve been working too much and I should take the afternoon off.” Obviously, this involves various factors, such as those listed above, but I think it’s really important to be the best boss you’ve ever had, if you’re in this job for the long haul.

I hope these tips are helpful! If there’s anything you want to ask me or tell me, just reply leave a comment!