Productivity

Jul 07 2010
Corinne McKay

The importance of down time

Here at Thoughts on Translation, I’ve been working on a loosely organized series of posts inspired by summer. A few weeks ago I wrote about ways to handle summer as a freelancing mom or dad; now let’s talk about the importance of down time in our freelance lives.

In the not-so-distant past (I’m 38 and I can remember this), we didn’t really have to schedule or even think about down time because there were many fewer technological intrusions into our lives. For example, I was in high school when my family first purchased an answering machine and in college before I ever used e-mail. I even remember going to visit family friends in Canada who still had party line telephone service in the 1980s.

With all of our 21st century opportunities to be working/on call/plugged in at all times, it’s important to think about the importance of down time and how to schedule it so that our businesses remain viable but we don’t burn out. Here are a few suggestions, and feel free to add your own!

Allow yourself to exclude certain types of technology from your life. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided that I just don’t want a smartphone, largely because the boundaries between my personal and work life are already so blurred. I respect (and even agree with) the reasons that people have and love smartphones, but I’m sticking with my prepaid cell phone that just makes phone calls.
Schedule down time in various increments. For example, I think that most people need at least an hour of mental down time a day. In fact, I think that an unplugged hour can actually increase a freelancer’s productivity. Likewise, I think that one fully unplugged day a week is really beneficial. Here’s an interesting New York Times article on the concept of a “secular Sabbath,” in which the writer unplugs completely for one day a week; and if a die-hard New Yorker can do it, I bet you can too!
If you can manage it financially, take at least one week of unplugged vacation time each year. For example, we took a family camping trip for a week at the beginning of this summer, and I made a deliberate decision not to take a laptop and to only turn my cell phone on once a day to check my work voice mail. In past years, I’ve gone as long as two weeks without checking e-mail at all. If you’re going to do this, I think it’s important to accept that there will be some opportunity cost; clients are not going to wait two weeks to hear back about their rush project. However, I find that this time to focus completely on my family is so valuable that it’s worth the loss of income.
Spend at least some of your down time doing simple activities that you enjoy. It’s debatable whether down time is good for you if you spend the whole time trying not to think about who you want to be calling or texting or who might have e-mailed you. Instead, let yourself enjoy the kinds of activities that people did before the advent of high-speed Internet. Grow some of your own food; bike or walk somewhere that you would normally drive; sleep late or go to bed early; write a real paper letter to someone you care about; read magazines at the library for a couple of hours; find a nice patch of grass and just lie on it and look at the sky!

I really love the point that this article makes (it’s from the journal Science). The author, Irene Levine, closes by saying “Consider how many of your most creative thoughts occur not in front of a computer screen or at the bench but while you are showering, golfing, lying in bed, or taking a jog in the park?” Don’t you think she’s right? So this summer, make sure that you get some time away from work so that you can start the fall feeling rested and recharged!

Jun 14 2010
Corinne McKay

Handling summer as a freelancing parent

Here in Colorado, school has been out for a couple of weeks. Elsewhere in the U.S., summer vacation is fast approaching. If you’re a freelancing mom or dad, it’s both the best of times and the worst of times! Each morning in the summer, I wake up and have a little gratitude moment: I’m grateful for a job that is so flexible; I’m grateful for a husband who supports both my work and my parenting; I’m grateful for a child who enjoys spending time with me; I’m grateful that I have a wonderful group of friends with kids of similar ages; I’m grateful that I enjoy what I do for work. On the flip side, if it’s hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the regular school schedule, it’s really hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the summer, no-school schedule. What’s a freelancing mom or dad to do?

As I see it, there are a few basic options: pay for child care in the form of a babysitter or summer camp, try to work while your kids are at home with you, work less or take the summer off, trade or barter child care or find a source of free child care, or patch together some combination of these strategies. As with all things parenting-related, I think that the ideal solution depends on how much you need or want to work, how many kids you have and how you get along with them, what financial resources you have available and how your spouse or partner (if you have one) can pitch in.

Here at the world headquarters of Thoughts on Translation, we tend to use the patchwork strategy and so far it has worked out well. Out of a 10 week summer break, we’ll be away for 3 weeks, my daughter will go to half-day or full-day camp for 5 weeks and we’ll have 2 free weeks at home. I feel that this gives me a good balance of uninterrupted work time and extra time to spend with my daughter and our friends, but I can also see that I’ll be working at night a lot more than I normally do. In addition, I think that the patchwork strategy works best if you only have one child. For example, the total tab for our 5 weeks of day camp was $1,500. Not bad as a percentage of my income, but if you are enrolling 2+ kids, the enrollment fees start to add up.

In mulling over how to plan our summer, here are a few creative solutions that I came up with; feel free to add your own!

Enlist your kids in the planning. This summer my daughter wanted more unstructured time, so we struck a deal that when she’s not at camp, she will read or listen to an audio book for at least an hour a day while I’m working.
Steal an hour here and an hour there. If your kids sleep later in the summer, get up as early as possible and work then. Maybe there’s an hour between when your spouse gets home and when you eat dinner; maybe you can get a netbook or small laptop and take it to the pool, park, playdates, etc. I have an Asus Eee netbook and I make a habit of always having it with me in the summer in case I get some unexpected work time.
Get your spouse on board. Maybe your spouse can arrive early at work and then leave early, so that you can have some extra work time in the afternoons.
Barter child care. You’re not the only one in the freelancing parent boat; maybe you could even form a child care co-op with other freelancing moms and dads. Maybe you have a friend who’s a stay at home mom or dad and wouldn’t mind watching your child (either for pay or as a trade or favor) some of the time.
Use a less expensive babysitter while you work at home. For example, we know several neighborhood middle-schoolers who will babysit for $3-$5 per hour while a parent is home. This is a significant savings over the $10-$15 per hour that “full-fledged” babysitters in our area charge.

When my daughter was really little, a wise older woman in the supermarket line said to me, “When they’re that age, the days are long and the years are short.” I find that in the summer, that advice is still true; the days often go slowly, but when school starts I’m always amazed at how fast summer vacation went. So, the last piece of advice for freelancing moms and dads with a long, hot summer ahead? Enjoy it!!

Apr 20 2010
Corinne McKay

Test drive: the Personal Efficiency Program

I’m not generally a fan of time management literature, but during a recent trip to the local library, Kerry Gleeson’s The Personal Efficiency Program: How to stop feeling overwhelmed and win back control of your work caught my eye (published 2009 by John Wiley and Sons, 4th edition). Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m working more and getting less done, and I’ve been hearing similar buzz from other freelancers (“I feel like I could work 24 hours a day and it wouldn’t be enough,” “I feel totally and constantly overwhelmed,” “I’m at my desk all day but I can’t seem to get anything done,” etc.). So, I decided to give PEP (as Gleeson calls the program) a try.

I opened this book with a few motivations in mind:

My e-mail inbox is out of control. Although I have a well-designed system of folders and filters, I currently have 496 messages languishing in my inbox.
Lately I’ve felt more stressed about work than I’d like to feel.
I feel like I’m doing less and taking more time to do it. For example, I somehow managed to publish the first edition of my book when I had a lot less available time than I have now. Still, I just can’t seem to finish the second edition.

The foundation of PEP is the mantra “Do It Now.” For example, many of us check e-mail every few minutes, but we take a long time to respond to or act on the e-mails that we’ve read. This creates a bad situation: the e-mail is hanging out waiting for a response, and we’re using mental energy thinking about responding or acting, or feeling guilty about not responding or acting. Then, because we don’t act or respond, we start getting more e-mail (“Did you receive my message?” “Have you thought about a good time to meet?” “Did you get a chance to read the article?” etc.). It’s not hard to see how this leads to stress and overwhelm. So, instead of obsessively reading e-mail, Gleeson advocates setting aside blocks of time to process e-mail. Then, you take action using one of the 4 Ds: Do it now (respond to the e-mail or act on it right then), Delegate it, Designate it (schedule a block of time to respond to or act on the e-mail) or Discard/file it. Gleeson advises checking e-mail only two or three times a day; personally I’m not there yet because I receive too many e-mails that need a fast response. For example, my European clients are only in the office until around 9 or 10AM Colorado time, so I need to respond to them right away. However, I’m trying to set aside 15 minutes every hour or hour and a half for e-mail, and I’ve decreased my backlog from about 10 messages per day to one or two.

PEP also pushes you to schedule, plan and log your time more than most of us do. Here again, I think it’s worth a try. My normal time management system before reading this book was to scribble a list of to-dos for the day in my planner in no particular order and with no particular time frame attached to them. Inevitably I would end up finishing the really critical items (i.e. work deadlines) and copying everything else over to the next day (and so on and so on and so on). Now I’ve switched to using the calendar feature of my e-mail program (KMail) and I’m amazed at how much it has decreased my stress level. Although my day is highly scheduled, I find that I can actually concentrate on what I’m doing because I’m not thinking about what else I should be doing. Instead of working on a translation while thinking “I really should have answered that message,” “I really need to work on that quote,” I can put it out of my mind because I know I have a block of time set aside for that task.

I think that effective time management has a lot to do with your personality type; for whatever reason, I’m quite good at meeting deadlines that someone else sets and not so good at meeting deadlines that I set for myself. So, I find that PEP is a good fit for me because a very detailed time schedule makes me feel that “someone else” (i.e. my scheduling program) is telling me to stick to that schedule. I also like the fact that Gleeson focuses not just on getting more done at work, but on working smarter so that you have more time for your family and leisure interests. Overall, I think that this book is worth a look if you need to take better control of your work day!

Apr 13 2010
Corinne McKay

The tyranny of the sub-goal

I learned the expression “the tyranny of the sub-goal” from my husband, who most frequently applies it to chores around the house, as in “We need to paint the living room but before that we have to fix the hole in the sheetrock where we smashed the corner of the washing machine into the wall.” Painting the living room is the goal, but since both of us despise doing drywall, the hole in the drywall becomes the lingering sub-goal that holds up the whole project. I had always assumed that this expression was some sort of standard IT-guy-speak but it actually doesn’t return any Google hits, so maybe it’s an original!

I think that there’s a lot of truth to the idea of the tyrannical sub-goal, and I also think that attacking these sub-goals usually takes less time than you’ve already spent procrastinating and complaining about them. I recently experienced this when I had to update the Colorado Translators Association bylaws for our upcoming election. I’m ashamed to even calculate (much less admit) how much time and emotional energy I had spent avoiding this task, and the whole election process was on hold because of it. Once I sat down and just did it, the total time from when I opened the file until I finished the edits was 13 minutes. Right: in about the same amount of time it takes me to brew a cup of coffee and return a phone call, I was done with the task that had been haunting me for weeks. Here are some typical translator sub-goals:

Website and résumé updates seem to be at the root of a lot of translators’ goal achievement problems. “I have this great marketing plan but I don’t want to implement it because I’m embarrassed to send clients to my website.” “I want to pursue a new specialization but first I have to redo my résumé and it’s taking me forever,” etc.
Small research tasks can also tyrannize your work life. For example, I’ve been thinking of hiring an intern but first I need to research the applicable employment laws related to paid and unpaid internships, so the idea is on hold.
Tasks that you despise are ripe for sub-goal tyranny. For me, it’s paperwork and accounting. This year I delayed preparing my W-2, which delayed getting my tax prep materials to my accountant, etc. etc. etc.

And some ideas for defeating them:

Create an external deadline. A lot of sub-goals remain unconquered because unlike our regular work, the time frame for completing them exists only in our heads. In addition, when a sub-goal has been on the to do list for a really long time, we no longer have any sense of urgency about it. The marketing plan? Well, if it didn’t get done in all of 2009, then does it really matter if it happens this week or in six months? So, create a deadline. Ask a colleague if he or she is available to proofread your résumé on Monday. Invite a friend over to usability-test your website next week. Then, you have to have the task completed by that date.
Admit defeat and hire someone to complete the sub-goal for you. This year I decided that although I’m generally anti-outsourcing, I had to hire someone to do my corporate payroll and I’m very happy with the results.
Decide that you don’t want to achieve the sub-goal. When you’re generally a 120 percenter (I love this expression, coined by Michelle Obama), it’s tough to throw in the towel on a task without feeling like a failure. However, I think that it’s important to be honest with yourself about your sub-goals. Sometimes the sub-goal remains undone because a certain project no longer seems important, relevant, fun or profitable to you. Then, cross the sub-goal off your list and let it go: and move on to something that really inspires you!