Priorities & Freelance Writing

Video Transcript

"REBECCA SATO: Hi. I'm Rebecca Sato with ExpertVillage.com. As a freelance writer, you're going to want to know how to be discipline and how to prioritize. Those are two very important things. Because as you advance in your career or if you already have a successful career, you'll come to find that when you're juggling multiple projects, it can be a real challenge to prioritize what to do with your time, and sometimes the tendency is to just do what you want to do and not do what should be doing. So here's a little technique that I use to make sure that I'm consistently doing, not necessarily, what I want to be doing but what I should be doing. And I've heard it's called different things, and one thing that I like is your MIT list and that is, "Most Important Things." So you'll make your little MIT list. You can either do it the end of your writing day, the day before or you can do it first thing in the morning. I like to do it first thing in the morning. I'll sit down and take five minutes, and don't check your e-mail, don't check your voicemail, don't get sidetrack. Before you do anything else, write down what are the three most important things that you have to get done that day. And you need to determine the criteria for what's the most important. Of course, you're going to be judging by how much you're getting paid for the project. You're going to be judging by when the deadline is. And you're going to be balancing all these different factors and you're going to use your best judgment to decide what are the three things that most need to be done today. And as a disciplined writer, you'll find that if you start with that list and work your way down before you get sidetracked with anything else, you'll have more time for your friends and family and you'll have more time and energy to be creative and to love your job. Because if you start procrastinating, things get really rough. We're going to talk about freelance writing and procrastination next, because it's something that's really, really important to deal with and to have a system for it before it becomes a problem."