The day of a work from home freelance writer goes a lot like anyone else’s day, minus the commute. There are long stretches of time spent generating actual work product. There are periods of time where you have to do communications (emails, phone calls, correspondence). There is record keeping and billing. And, if you have an online business, there is time spent maintaining and updating your website and server software.
Small Tasks to Build Online Exposure
The trick is being able to use smaller chunks of time wisely. This isn’t always as easy as it sounds. For example, I have 15 minutes (18 if I push it) before I have to be out the door to handle something for the household. Blowing off that 15 minutes is certainly an option, but not one that builds long-term success for an online writing business. There are many things that could be done with that same 15 minutes, but what task is best?
The answer, not surprisingly, can change from day to day. There are numerous little things that can be helpful that don’t seem to get full attention from me. There is social networking, for example. I do pretty well about getting something posted on Twitter each day, but maybe not enough. I do severely neglect my Google+ account, even though Google will continue to make it more and more important until people are finally compelled to use it like they want. I almost never go on LinkedIn even though it is a commonly used means of finding other professionals.
Then, there are blog posts (short ones), research (finding and marking, not actually reading), tidying my desk, updating profiles, learning new software and services, and so on, and so on.
So, what should the online businessperson do with 15 odd minutes?
Whatever you can do NOW.
While deciding what to do with my 15 minutes, I realized that many tasks would take a bit of prep. Finding materials, switching browsers, checking calendars, and the like. If you already only have 15 minutes, spending three or four of them getting ready to do something is almost like just wasting the whole 15 minutes because by the time you get started, they’ll be even less time to be productive with.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, this is a 12 minute blog post (including linking and uploading and so on.) That means I totally got to screw around for three whole minutes.