Author: William Gallagher

YOU ARE doing too much: your To Do list is creaking and your calendar looks like a game of Tetris. It’s time to have a spring clean of your work. This isn’t some idealistic fantasy either, this is practical and this is urgent.

For if you keep on going the way you have been, you’ll be lucky if the result is that only one or two projects are going to go wrong, only one or two clients are going to be disappointed. What’s more likely is that you’ll break your back to get every project done on time yet none of them will be worth your name.

Every job you do is an advert for you so constantly churning out adequate work is not going to help you get better commissions, it’s not going to help you grow your craft. You’ll end up hating this career that you have worked so hard for.

Avoid the Tetris approach

So today you are your own client. Seriously. Put a meeting with yourself in your calendar.

As a client, you have obvious and clear requirements: they are the projects you currently have on the go, work that you are currently and specifically commissioned for.

Write those down: just their titles and clients, don’t bother with details.

It’s a bigger list than you expected. It’s always a bigger list but now it gets bigger still. Add on the work you expect to come and then most importantly add those projects you want to do.

This list is your current workload and you cannot do it all.

Your job is to decide what to keep and what to ditch.

In an ideal wishy-washy world you could treat all of these commissions as equal but in our real-life freelance creative world, they are not. You have committed to some of them, you have promised. Unless you know the client very well and can genuinely talk with them, there’s no room to change these at all.

It’s the opposite with the work you haven’t got yet but you want. You could decide to ditch all of that but then in two months’ time you’ll have nothing to do.

So look now at each piece of work as if you can choose to do it or not. What’s it really worth to you? Are you doing it because you’ve always done it and over the years it’s become less interesting or profitable? If the time it takes is far more than the work is worth to you, finish this one and get out of doing more.

Take a look at each of the things you want to do. Seriously, do you still want to do them? If you do, then schedule them. This is the one you’ll pursue today, that’s the one you’ll look into next month.

Your clients have schedules, they have needs and they have a budget. So do you. Take this time to lift your head up from the work and see where you’re going. Do it for your craft and, yes, even for your health’s sake.

More information:

For further ideas on how to get more organised so that you focus more on your creative work and achieve better results, try our online course 'Creative Productivity' (free to members).

It used to be that everyone blogged and now it seems that everyone has moved on to Twitter and Facebook instead. Of course they have: blogging is more challenging. It needs exactly and precisely the skills and the talent that you use every day as a creative practitioner – and that most people simply do not have. They’re also not freelances looking to make a name, make some money or stretch their abilities. For us, blogs are like agents getting us readers and spreading our name without our knowing it and without claiming 10-15% afterwards. Plus, you can promote your blog on Facebook and Twitter.

There is that issue of money. Don’t get excited now. It is possible to make cash out of your blog but you will make more from the work that you get via it. Sometimes that’s clear and direct such as when magazines have reprinted blog posts of mine and paid me for it. Also, I’ve interviewed bloggers who were journalists and writers who told me they have book deals in mind from day one and they got them.

But then I talked to Jennifer Williams, a blogger from Brooklyn who isn’t a writer and didn’t think about books at all. Nonetheless, that’s what she’s got. She’s an artist whose blog of sketches is called ‘What My Daughter Wore’ and a publisher chanced upon it and found her charming, joyous feel irresistible.

Promoting yourself

More often, people will find your blog because you tell them about it. You know how you have to have a website now? It’s can be a pain and sometimes an expense setting up a website and then it’s a chore keeping it updated but you know you have to. If someone comes to your site and the latest thing on there is from five years ago, you look bad.

Blogs go on your website or can act as your website. Plus, every time you blog, the date and time is slapped on there automatically. So blogging regularly is a way to keep your website looking fresh and you looking active.

It’s also a way to advertise yourself, literally, in that you can promote your gigs on your blog if you’re a musician and you can upload videos to it if you’re a filmmaker. But, much more importantly, every single thing you post on your blog is a huge advert for you.

That’s easy to understand with writers. I’m a writer and I have been commissioned because people see and like how I write my blogs. But writing is not about the words you type. It’s about you and what you reveal. Blogging regularly tells me, demonstrates to me that you are real. You’re a creative professional and this is your real job. That’s one reason why posting that you’ve got a gig somewhere is genuinely useful: only the smallest fraction of your readers can physically get to one particular venue but every single reader is seeing that you are performing.

It’s about you and it’s not about you

You’ll run dry quite quickly if you only blog about yourself, though. Look for a topic you are interested in: I’m a writer so I have a blog about writing. There must be a million of these. But one day something just poured out of me. I wrote about why I became a writer at all. I am the writer I am today because of a now little-known US TV show called Lou Grant. I posted this short and heartfelt little tribute to a show few here in the UK ever knew and I got a lot of reaction from people responding to how dear this drama was to me. They didn’t know it, they just responded to how I had bared a bit of my soul to them.

And then the executive producer of Lou Grant emailed me to say thanks. I’ll never get any work from him – he’s retired and on another continent – but you know how much that email meant to me. Blogs are about reaching out to people and sometimes about reaching in to yourself.

Plus, shortly afterwards, I did a piece about UK drama and Father Ted creator Graham Linehan tweeted a link to it. Nobody paid me to write it, nobody asked me to write it, but six thousand people visited my blog that day and editors ask me about it still. Basically, it raised my profile and got people talking about what I do and, as a result, I got work from it.

More info

If you want to improve your blogging skills, look out for our workshop which will be advertised in the beginning of 2015.

BEFORE YOU can make great use of your computer, your phone and your tablet, switch them off. Not completely, just switch off everything about them that distracts you. Email: off. Facebook: definitely off. Email is more than a boon to us, it is impossible to do our businesses without yet it isn’t as important as we think. The world won’t end if we don’t respond to that incoming message bleep immediately. We just act as if it will.

You’re not going to undo the way we have all been programmed to react to bleeps and notifications so switch them off. However, while you can just switch off Facebook and stop thinking about it, email takes a bit more effort. No matter how busy you are, there will still be some people who you must respond to immediately.

Gmail lets you have a separate inbox for important emails: set it to only notify you when something arrives there. Apple Mail has an even better feature: you can specify that certain people are VIP and then only get the bleep when they send you a message.

Time saving technology tips

With the distractions out of the way, there is so much more you could be using this technology for. There is life- and career-transforming software, utilities and extras you can buy but look at what you’ve already got first.

Start with your web browser. Every single one of them has the same thing at the top: an area called an address bar. You click in it, delete whatever’s already there and start typing a website name or something that you’re searching for. Never click again. Instead, hold down the Ctrl key on your PC or your Command key on your Mac and tap the letter L. The moment you do that, you are in that address bar and everything is selected: type anything at all and it will replace what’s already there.

The time it saves physically clicking and deleting is minimal but the way it lets you concentrate on what you want to do is highly beneficial. You will get so fast at moving around websites that you’ll think about selling your mouse.

It’s the same in email. Without taking your hands off the keyboard you can reply to people, forward messages and archive them. Or even delete a few. It’s the same in Word too: you can select text, copy it, move it around, change every last detail of it and save it out into new documents without once lifting your hands away from the keys.

Do watch out for RSI. But also whatever software you use the most, take a minute to Google its name and the phrase “keyboard shortcuts”. You will be dizzy at the list you find. Hundreds upon hundreds of ways to do things without your mouse. Try a couple, practise them until they’re habitual, and you won’t go back.

Easy access

I had a thing where a producer who rejected a script of mine left his company. I found out who replaced him, got out the old script and sent it over. Total time: under a minute. And that was despite the script being so old I couldn’t remember the name or where I’d put it. But I could remember a character from it so I searched for that and Mac OS X found it instantly. Windows from version 7 upwards can do the same thing: they search within your documents.

This is another thing to Google because it varies too much between systems. But if you need to find a script featuring a character called Bert, that you wrote between 2007 and 2012, which you once sent as an attachment to the Acme Broadcasting Company, you can tell your computer exactly that and it will find exactly that script.

Worth investment

You can do all of this right now on the computer you own. But you can do more. My freelance business was transformed by my switching to OmniFocus, a To Do manager that is both very powerful and happens to suit me down to the ground. Recently I’ve been converted to the same company’s OmniOutliner for roughing out complex projects.

When I have that itch of a new idea I know could be great if I can just get hold of it somehow, I’ll now do a Mind Map of it (for more on this, if you're a member, have a look at the ecourse I've written for FEU freelances 'Creative Productivity' ). Just throw down ideas in any order, in any way and then later start shuffling them around. It’s exactly like the way I first sorted out the mud in my head when I was truly overwhelmed by the volume of work I had to do. Especially since I now do this on my iPad, it feels like I’m laying everything out in front of me and I am able to physically push it around.

I use an app called Mind Node for that and I recommend it but there are many equivalents for every type of computer or tablet or even phone that you can get.

TextExpander is useful: I actually like typing – I’m such a writer – but that utility lets me repeat often-used text like bios or complicated text like Amazon links. I never have to remember that “http://amzn.to/1dO1nue” takes you to one of my books, I just press a couple of keys and TextExpander pops out that lot. TextExpander is Mac- and iOS-only but there’s an equivalent called Breevy.

I’ve never used that. I’ll never use everything and if you tried, you’d have no time to do your real work. But my computer, iPad and phone are so useful that I do exploit them every way I can.

There’s a bit of the boy with a new toy in me sometimes but all I want from technology, all I want from other people, all I really want from me is more time to write. The only way I get better at writing is to do it and productivity is about clearing time for the reason I am a creative freelance in the first place.

More info

If you want to learn more about becoming more organised and productive, sign in to the FEU ecourse Creative Productivity. It's free to members and you can dip into it whenever you want - on the train, before meetings or when you've got a quiet hour or two to work through the whole course or specific modules.

The BIGGEST single problem that stops you getting more done is you. But in second place comes everybody else. Maybe Facebook is joint second but really it’s the way that whenever you need something from somebody, there is a delay.

However, think about what happens when you need something from someone. Whether it’s the tiniest contractual detail or it’s approval before you can go on to the next thing, the process works the same way. You tell them what you need, they don’t answer and you’re left hanging around. You’re human so you can’t help but churn over it. Is it too soon to chase them? Is it too late to go stand on their desk until they do it?

Set parameters

Rather than waste your time and energy dwelling on what may or may not happen, I’d suggest you set some parameters. Phone them up and when you get their inevitable voicemail, leave a message like you always would do except add this to the end: “I’ve sent you the email with the terms and conditions that we discussed. If you don’t get a chance to ring me back earlier, I’ll ring you on Friday to check that everything is OK.”

By doing this, you’ve prompted them to call back if they want to (or not, if they don't want to) and you've given yourself permission to stop thinking about it until Friday. Basically, you’ve taken control, acted professionally and can now move on to another job.

There’s no guarantee that you’ll get them on Friday but there wasn’t a guarantee anyway. What there is now is the fact that you don’t need to think of them until then.

I don’t mean to suggest that people are rubbish at phoning you back because they’re rubbish. You know that it’s really just that they’re busy. One thing that leaving this type of message does is tell them that you get that, you’re fine with it, in fact you understand it because you’re busy too. We’re all professionals, that’s what you’re saying. It’s like when you haggle over a contract fee - even though behind the take-it-or-leave-it bluff you really, really need that money, if you look like you don’t need a job, you get it. If you sound like you’re busy, you’ll get busy.

Plan ahead

After weeks, even months of chasing someone, it’s often the case that people suddenly make a decision and want information about what you do at the snap of their fingers. Rather than be caught on the hop, I’ve always got several different CVs ready to go – e.g., my one for journalism mentions Radio Times a lot; my drama one plugs the Doctor Who radio plays I’ve written. Also, I have bio text and head shots ready.

Build a stack of information about yourself so that you can tweak it for the next time rather than waste time writing everything from scratch. A good tip for writing bios is to write down two things you’ve ever done that are relevant to the work you want and one thing that is notable or perhaps a bit unusual but ridiculously far away from what you do.

For instance, the last thing I did that needed a bio was a gig being a judge on a television awards panel. I wrote that “William Gallagher is a Radio Times writer, author of BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair and he’s flown helicopters”.

I was the least of all the judges on that panel but my bio went first on the programme and I think it’s because I was the first to reply to the request and I included some information that was remarkably different from everyone else. This happens: I’ve been given my pick of a slot just because I was so fast responding. And I can be fast because I have this stuff ready.

Actually, just between us, I also use some technology. If I simply type my little code phrase “xbio” into an email or into Word, then my Mac pops out a 400-word bio that I’ve previously written. I then edit it, of course, and I bend it to suit the project I’m on, but it’s easier to change 400 words than it is to start anew. Technology is truly the creative freelancer’s friend and you’ve already spent a lot on your computer…next time we’ll deal with getting much more out of that.

I LEARNT all sorts of methods at BBC News Online for being productive and I am naturally drawn to technology so I’d had ‘To Do’ apps anyway. But it was when a job was going really well that I started looking into productivity more deliberately.

I thought I was being clever: my big freelance contract was with Radio Times magazine, which I loved, but I wanted to write books and Doctor Who radio dramas too. If I could handle my time better, I figured, I could go do that and keep the regular RT work.

Then, Radio Times made me redundant. You know that any redundancy, any abrupt end to a long job is a difficult time and I’m not going to pretend that I was unaffected. Plus, if they hadn’t kicked me out, I would never have left: I loved that magazine and its website so much.

However, let me be exactly as honest for one more moment: as it turned out, I now thank Radio Times hourly. They could not have made me redundant at a better time and the fact that I was already applying myself to making better use of my time turned out to be an advantage when I suddenly and unexpectedly needed to take a structured and efficient approach to getting more work.

Get on top of your work

Hopefully your work isn’t going to suddenly stop but there’s no question that it will change. It is part of what makes your job interesting but change is often challenging. It usually seems that you have to do more and you have to do that more with less resources. If your work today exactly matches your original job description, you’re unusual, your business is strange and I suggest you’ve got to be bored.

Being busy or being bored is like being rich or poor. People tell you philosophically that these are really the same thing but you know which one you’d prefer.

They can both be overwhelming, though and we’re not good when we’re overwhelmed. We are rubbish at dealing with masses of problems and responsibilities at once. However, we are superb at doing our work. Tell us what to do next and it gets done brilliantly.

This is one thing in favour of having one boss and one job: let him or her decide what they need next and you can just get on with it. It is the number of spinning plates rather than the plates or the spinning itself that is a problem.

I think this can be worse for creatives and ten times worse for freelance creatives. More than anyone else in any other job, you are doing what you do because it’s your art and it’s your vocation. There’s a fair chance you just snorted there because art and vocation feel a long time ago when you’re struggling to get new work or you’re ferociously struggling to complete what you’ve promised.

Break it all down before you breakdown

You’ve got the doing covered - you are superb at the doing. You just need to find a way through the mud of deciding what’s the most urgent and important thing you must do right now.

It’s only mud in your head. Get it all out of your noggin’ and write the lot down on a list. Don’t think about it, don’t plan, don’t do anything except dump it all out onto paper or a screen. Take as long as you need to do this. Get every scintilla out of your head and onto the list in front of you.

You might be daunted by the size and scope of what you’ve written but you’ll also feel better. Seriously, just by doing this, you will feel better. It’s because you’ll feel ready. You’re changing this mud into one specific thing to do, one specific task. Your job now is to examine the list and sort it out. That’s doing and, I am not kidding or flattering you here, you are great at doing.

Look at your big list and start grouping things together: this is all stuff for that commissioning editor; that is all for your accountant and this is all leads for new work. Make big, wide, open groups where you just bung things together loosely.

Then take one group and sort that. Some of the things you’ve listed in a group will be vital, others will be the whole reason you wanted to be the artist you are, and some will be rubbish, which you can scrap immediately. Just let the rubbish go because you know it’s not going to happen so there’s no point in keeping it in your head.

Park all the stuff that you want to do, that will wait for just a little while. For now, you’re concentrating on the vital stuff. Break that down even further. If something has a real, actual, definite, committed deadline then write that down.

The odds are that you’ve written very big and quite vague things like “pitch to producer” or “write book”. Good. Now take one of those and think about what that actually means. If you’re going to pitch to a producer, you need to know which one and then decide what you’re going to pitch and when. So write that down. Rather than “pitch to producer”, write something like this: “Choose which producer, decide what project, find a date to contact him or her” and then start doing. And – say it with me – you are great at doing. It’s just a shame that other people aren’t. That’s what we’ll talk about next time.