It’s way too easy to get caught up in a great inflow of work. Makes you feel successful and professional. Until you sit down and realize that you are going to have to find an extra 4 hours in each day in order to actually make the deadlines. You learn the hard way that its hard to write after only 3 hours of sleep each night. Be forewarned that this is an actual problem that freelance writers face.

It will likely take a few crunch sessions for this point to really hit home, and for you to figure out where your cut-off point has to be. That’s where I’m at right now. I have a new project for 50 travel articles, which has completely put my time constraints over the top. Thankfully, the deadline for that is about a month away. So I can look forward to getting a more reasonable workload then. But for the next month, my regular and ongoing work is going to suffer and a couple of my independent sites are going to be put on hold. Be prepared for that kind of sacrifice. Taking a big (and well-paying job) can very well mean that something else may have to go.

Once you figure out when you’re at your limit, you MUST resist temptation to push beyond it.  Being reasonable about your abilities is an important skill that all freelance writers have to master eventually.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 10:32 am and is filed under Online Writing 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.