Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Productivity


Corinne McKay

Maybe you need a co-working office?

Everything “co” seems to be hot these days (co-living, car sharing, and so on), and after working in a “co” office for three years, I thought I’d share some thoughts and tips.

About three years ago, after 10 years of working from home, I hit the wall. My daughter (the main reason I started working from home in the first place) had started middle school, many of my friends who used to work part-time or not at all had gone back to full-time work, and I was unhappy and not getting a lot done during the day. Go out into the kitchen to get a drink of water…only to be confronted by a heap of dirty dishes. Get an e-mail asking if I could chaperone the school field trip…and end up feeling guilty about having to work instead. So, I decided that the problem wasn’t working from home, it was me plus working from home, so something had to change.

Three years in, my three-word summary is: I love it. I really don’t plan to ever work from home again on a permanent basis, although I do work primarily from home in the summers when my daughter is out of school. My income has gone up a lot; I gave myself a parameter that I had to make up the office rent in increased income and I exceed that goal, and I find that I’m much more able to focus on work when I’m at work. I’m much happier with my work situation, and I also find that when I get home, I’m much more able to focus on things other than work, which I had a very hard time doing before.

For my first two and a half years of co-working, I worked in an office in a historic school building, where the other co-workers were mostly middle-aged word nerds. When that office closed, I moved to a new office which has more of a tech/startup vibe and I’m one of the oldest people there, but I like both offices in their own way. At the first office I paid $350 a month and at the new office I pay $330, which includes my own desk, coffee, meeting space, etc. I leave my large monitor, full-size keyboard, etc. at the office and carry my laptop back and forth on my bike. The office also has a printer, copier, etc. so I’m pretty much set in terms of office equipment.

The only main caveat I would give is that working in a co-working office requires either a fairly high ambient noise tolerance or a willingness to wear headphones a lot (I alternate between the two). People are on the phone, or chatting, or whatever…there just always seems to be some kind of conversation going on. I find that kind of enjoyable, but it’s something to think about.

I’ve also heard from readers who want to try co-working but can’t find an office near them. The easiest option would be to just DIY: go work from a cafe or the library when you need to get out of the house. Another interesting option would be to form some kind of co-working club: get a couple of freelancers (or 20 freelancers…whatever!) together and meet up to work together. One day a week, or one day a month, or whenever you want; meet at the library or a cafe, or someone’s house, or a space like a church basement that you could use inexpensively.

Also, don’t discount the option of co-working on the road. Last summer my daughter did a day camp in Denver, which is about a 40 minute drive from our house. I couldn’t get excited about the idea of either doing two round trips a day, or camping out in a cafe for 7 hours, so I rented a desk for a week at Creative Density, a really fun co-working space in Denver (and they separate their rooms by noise level…yay!). So that’s an interesting option too!


Corinne McKay

What's worth outsourcing or paying for?

At the recent Colorado Translators Association mid-year conference, a few of us got to talking about tasks that we outsource and services that we pay for. This got me thinking about what types of services we freelancers a) can and b) should be outsourcing or paying for.

It’s important to realize that having the proper tools and services for your business costs money. Running a freelance business entails a lot less overhead than running, say, a restaurant, but if you try to operate on zero overhead, your business will suffer. I’ll give you a list of services that I either outsource or pay for, and then I’m interested to hear what you have to say too.

A task is ripe for outsourcing/paying money for if:

  • You hate it, are terrible at it, and therefore avoid it (mine: accounting)
  • It provides you with information that would be time-consuming or impossible to obtain on your own (mine: Payment Practices)
  • It generates way more income than what you pay for the service (mine: E-Junkie)
  • You can hire someone who is much better at the task than you are (mine: graphic design and screencast videos)
  • It saves you a lot of time and hassle (mine: Adobe PDF conversion service)
  • It lets you bring in an additional revenue stream ( mine: MailChimp e-mail list)
  • It protects your business against disaster (mine: SugarSync online backup service)

The tasks and services that I currently outsource, and their approximate costs, are listed below. Note that these are not affiliate links, just services I love.

  • Accounting: my accountant does my quarterly payroll taxes and year-end corporate tax return. About $1,000 per year.
  • Subscription to Payment Practices so that I can vet agencies before I work with them. About $20 per year.
  • Subscription to SugarSync to fully back up my laptop hard drive every time I connect to the Internet, in case my laptop is lost/stolen/falls out of my bike bag and gets run over by a bus. About $75 per year.
  • Basic membership to E-Junkie, so that I can sell PDF copies of my book directly from my website with automatic downloads. $5 per month.
  • Graphic designer to do website banners, book covers, etc. Cost depends on the project, about $600 per year.
  • Instructional designer to make screencast videos for my online courses. About $500 per course.
  • Adobe’s online PDF conversion service, which works really well on really lousy PDFs. About $25 per year.
  • MailChimp mailing list service so that I can send out my weekly e-newsletter. $25 per month.

I also have various other paid pieces of software: an MP3 recording service for Skype calls, a scanner program so that I can still use my really old scanner, etc.

All of these services add up to a fairly substantial cost; but I also think that far too many translators think that “if it costs money, I’m not buying it,” which is a short-sighted way to run a business. If there’s a tool that helps you work better, or that frees up your time so that you can do what you’re good at while someone else does what they’re good at, I think it’s almost always worth buying.

It’s also important to think about the consequences of not having a particular tool or service. I don’t work with that many agencies, but since a Payment Practices membership costs less than a minimum charge, it’s clearly a good investment. In 13 years of freelancing, I’ve never had a major computer failure, partially because I’m pretty scrupulous about upgrading my main work computer every two to three years, but for $75 a year, I’m not risking what would happen if my laptop were stolen from my co-working office, or if I spilled coffee all over it. Those situations fall into the category of “penny wise, pound foolish” and every freelancer should avoid that!

Readers: over to you…what do you outsource or pay for?


Corinne McKay

An atypical dilemma: "I need less work"

Here’s a question I received from a colleague: “You’re always writing about how to find new clients and get more work. I have the opposite problem: I have work coming out of my ears and I’m trying to cut back.” OK! Thoughts on Translation is committed to addressing issues at all points on the freelance spectrum, so let’s give this one a try.

This actually is not the first time I’ve heard this question, primarily from translators in their 60s and 70s who still want to work, but not full-time and not under stressful conditions. But it also applies to some translators with young kids, or people with other jobs. Definitely worth a look.

If you’re in the “I need less work” boat, first you have to accept that maybe 1% of freelancers have just the right amount of work. The other 99% of us have to choose between a little too little work and a little too much work. And because I hate worrying about money, my preference is to have a little too much work, then take longish vacations where I don’t work at all. But if you’re bound and determined to cut down on your work flow, first ask yourself:

  • What do you want and not want out of your work situation? For example I’d say the typical person in this category says, “I want some income, I want some professional activity in my life, but I don’t want to be stressed out and I want a significant amount of free time.” Even if your answer is radically different, make sure to answer that question. What’s your priority? What do you not want to deal with?
  • How much of a factor is money? If you’re on the semi-retired end of the spectrum, money might be less of a factor; you might have the luxury of working for clients you really like, rather than the clients who pay the most. If you have young kids, it may be the opposite situation: money is paramount, because you need to earn a semi-full-time income while working around your family’s schedule.
  • How much of a factor is job satisfaction? Again, this varies from individual to individual. Perhaps you’re that semi-retired translator who’s working primarily or even exclusively because you enjoy it; perhaps you’re that new parent thinking “$%&^& satisfaction…the point is to make money.”

Then, pick a strategy. Of course, the path of least resistance is to raise your rates. A lot. Own it; tell clients, “If you’re looking for an inexpensive option, it’s not me,” or “I only work with the very high end of the market,” or “Call me when you have a bigger budget.” That should do the trick pretty quickly, but it may also eliminate clients you want to keep working with, especially if job satisfaction is a priority for you. So you could also try:

–Putting some parameters on your availability or your working conditions. You don’t work on Fridays, or you don’t work with clients who require you to work in their online TM portal, or you don’t work with clients who send out work offers via mass e-mail.

–Taking longer vacations so that you’re working less overall. I’ll be honest: I’ve tried the “I need to work less” system a few times (I’m going to take Friday afternoons off, I’m not checking e-mail after 5, I’m not finishing stuff up in the evenings, etc.), and it’s never really worked. So my preferred solution is to take longer vacations where I may be checking e-mail, but I am not actively working. By timing these to coincide with most of my clients’ slow periods (Christmas/New Years, July and August), I don’t know that I actually lose a lot of income, but I definitely gain sanity. Each year I take about six weeks completely off, which is pretty normal outside the US but almost unheard of within the US. So that’s my recommendation if you’re in a decent financial position: give yourself a month off this summer and do some digital detox.

–Doing the “does this spark joy” test on every project. If you get that knot in your stomach, turn it down, or stop working with that client. Only work on projects that make you feel excited about working.

Readers, over to you! Any thoughts on this?


Corinne McKay

Thoughts on managing your e-mail

In the age of Information Overload, it seems to get harder and harder to maintain any semblance of control over the volumes of e-mail we receive. But, there’s hope, and there are strategies…let’s take a look at a few, and feel free to add your own in the comments.

Let’s start with e-mail management techniques I use and find helpful

  • Mercilessly unsubscribe and filter. I have trouble ignoring an e-mail once it lands in my Inbox, so I need technology to help me prioritize. My goal: limit the Inbox to time-sensitive messages. So, as soon as I get added to a mailing list I don’t want to be on, I unsubscribe. Right then, without guilt. Perhaps more importantly, I set up filters to send non-time-sensitive e-mail to somewhere other than my Inbox. For example I don’t want to unsubscribe from my neighborhood e-mail list, or my ATA division e-mail lists, but I don’t necessarily want to read those messages the second they come in. So I set up a “skip the Inbox” filter to immediately put those e-mails in specially-labeled folders. This saves a ton of time and distractions.
  • Shut off as many notifications as you can. If you’re present on social media sites, you are likely to get a lot of notifications from them: someone followed you on Twitter, someone replied to your Facebook post, someone on LinkedIn has a work anniversary, etc. These sites (especially LinkedIn, in my experience) generate so many notifications that it’s worth spending 10 minutes to dig into the Settings labyrinth and shut them off.
  • Make peace with brevity. I’m a wordy person. I talk a lot, I write a lot. But between my own translation work, my teaching and consulting work and my ATA-related work, I get a ton of e-mail. I’ve forced myself to accept that a polite but very brief response (“Great! Thank you so much for letting me know.” “Wednesday at 1 PM works best for me; talk to you then.” “I’m not interested in this right now, but thanks for thinking of me!”) is OK. I’d like to say more, but this kind of response does the trick in a pinch.
  • Accept that reading and answering e-mail takes a lot of your time. When I started freelancing 13 years go, “let me just clear out the Inbox before I shut down for the day” was still an option. But that option (for me, and I’m guessing for many of you) is long gone. When I do a little benchmarking to find out how long I spend on various work-related tasks, I find that I spend one to two hours reading and answering e-mail on an average day. Of course, some of this involves actually doing work over e-mail–for example critiquing a student’s resume and cover e-mail. But the point being that even on a day when I “just take care of e-mail,” that’s a good number of hours.
  • Hit the low-hanging fruit first. When I open my Inbox on an average morning, I have probably 15-30 unread e-mails waiting (and that’s the time-sensitive ones that make it into my Inbox; not marketing stuff or e-newsletters). By scanning the preview lines, I can tell which ones can be knocked off with a quick response (pick a meeting time, how much do you charge to translate a marriage certificate, where is the 2018 ATA conference). So I do those first, then go back to the ones that require more thought.
  • Don’t let e-mail rule you, but don’t let it get away from you either. I try not to be enslaved to my e-mail; I don’t think that someone’s going to die if they don’t get a response from me within five minutes. I have a smartphone but I don’t spend a ton of time answering e-mail when I’m not actually working. However, failing to respond to e-mail generates more e-mail (did you get my message, we’re waiting on you to schedule the meeting, should I ask another translator to work on this if you’re too busy). So in a way, letting e-mail pile up can exponentially increase the amount of time it takes to manage it.

Now let’s move on to e-mail management techniques I don’t use, but that I think are a good idea

  • Only answer e-mail at set times. The top of the hour, four times a day, etc. If you work on long-deadline projects like books, this could be a great idea.
  • Have totally separate work and personal e-mail addresses. Only check the work e-mail during the work day, only check personal at night and on weekends. I just find that my work and personal friends are so commingled that this doesn’t work.
  • Practice a one-touch rule. Once you open an e-mail, don’t close it and let it sit there: respond to it, delete it, file it, or mark it as unread. I like to mull things over, so this doesn’t really work for me, but it’s certainly efficient.
  • Create an auto-responder that eliminates the expectation of an immediate response. I recently e-mailed someone whose auto-response basically says “I’ve received your message and I’ll get back to you within the next few days. If this is really urgent, call me.” Personally I don’t have the guts to do that, but I thought it was an interesting technique!
  • Purge e-mail more than a month (two months, etc.) old. Another technique I don’t have the guts for but ultimately kind of admire; if someone’s e-mail has sat in your inbox for six weeks, a) you’ll probably never respond, or b) it’s probably no longer relevant, or c) the sender probably forgot about it. Pick a date, click the tickbox next to every message older than that, and get rid of them. The blackbelt form of this would be “e-mail bankruptcy,” where you delete everything and start from zero. If you’re in really dire e-mail straits (I recently talked to someone whose Inbox contains over a thousand unread e-mails), a radical step like this is worth some thoughts.
  • Have an e-mail-free portion of your day. I can’t do this in the morning because I’m already eight hours behind my French and Swiss clients, but sometimes I do it in the afternoon when most of my clients are already out of the office. Shut down your e-mail and just work for two hours, and watch how much you get done.

Readers, over to you!


Corinne McKay

In the Balance, Episode 8: Boundaries

Here’s Episode 8 of In the Balance, the series of work-life balance videos I’ve been doing for the Standing Out Facebook group. This episode focuses on boundaries: why you need them and how to set them. I mention three types of boundaries that freelancers need to think about, plus a bonus tip on knowing when to give up on certain boundaries! In the comments, let us know a) a boundary that you’d like to set in 2016, or b) a boundary-setting technique that works well for you. Enjoy!