I know no one is probably reading this blog anymore, but I want to get this down, even if it’s only for myself. The most important lesson I learned about successful, productive freelancing in 2010 was this: everything is generative.

In plain English, that means this: Doing trumps planning. There’s no such thing as wasted work or projects. And whatever you do almost always snowballs into more of the same…whether you like it or not.

Case study: In 2010, I soft-relaunched my online-video production studio, Small Mammal, after letting it hibernate for a year following a painful (but amicable) split with my co-founder. I say “soft-relaunched” because the idea of doing a formal “Hello World” thing all over again with a new website and business plan and client-hunting strategy and all the rest literally gave me ulcers to even contemplate. I just wanted to do the work, when I had it, and continue my freelance writing when I didn’t… and not worry about the formal, outward-facing aspects of my in-name-only “company.”

So that’s what I did. A small one-off project for NPR in 2009 that I didn’t even pitch (they randomly found me from a long-defunct science series I created) snowballed into half a dozen more projects throughout ’10. Same thing with Nature.com. Same thing with Ars Technica. The less I “strategized” and the more I just did, the more work rolled in — almost of its own accord. I didn’t make a ton of money, but it was the best year I’d ever had, financially, as a freelancer. And most of it was video work “through” Small Mammal, even though my website sucked and I never established an LLC. (I’m happy to say I did redo the site, finally, but it was only at the end of the year!)

And the stuff I didn’t like doing, or even hated — it wasn’t wasted time. I gained reporting experience, producing experience, contacts… even business intelligence, even if it was just “never pitch that magazine section again.” That stuff often snowballs in unpredictable, useful, remunerative ways as well.

Everything is generative. Work begets work. Plans have their place, but we all know what Lennon said about them.

So that’s the good news. The bad news — well not really “bad,” although it could be bad if you let it — is that it works in reverse as well. That’s what I’m learning already in 2011. What you do — literally do, not say you do or wish you do — tends to create more of itself whether you want it to or not.

Case study: I’ve made a few well-regarded iPad app promos for some cool clients. Now, other people are seeing them and I end up making more. In fact, I’m doing one now with another hot on its heels. This is a good thing. But there are only so many hours in my workday — or workweek, or workyear. How do I want to spend them?

I recently had to turn down two science writing assignments that I’d have loved to do, because I simply don’t have time given my previous app-promo-video commitments. This isn’t the end of the world. It’s not even a “bad” thing: I know from experience that trying to stuff 10 pounds into a 5 pound bag just ends in tears. And other opportunities will come. But it made me remember/consider: just because you’re busy as a freelancer doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing the work you ideally want to be doing (or in my case, having the balance I want to be having). Hell, that’s usually the norm. But it doesn’t have to be.

I can interpret this little blip in several different ways, regarding my business:

• Maybe I need to expand/hire help. But that creates administrative headaches I don’t want, and probably can’t afford anyway.
• Maybe I need to not say “yes” to (almost) every opportunity. Hm, perhaps, but I don’t think I’m in that much demand for such a policy to make sense, especially in this economy.
• Maybe I just need to decide to do what I want to be doing, as often as I can. That seems to make the most sense. If I want a better balance between promotional work and my science writing, I should choose to do more science writing and less promotional work. The more I mentally orient towards that “want,” the more I’ll notice appropriate opportunities and the more I will do with them, which will create more such opportunities. (Or, even better, perhaps I will notice better synergies between promotional/video and science writing that I can exploit to converge upon that desired balance.)

I also noticed that I’ve been adding to my drawerful of “dream feature” ideas for oh, about five years, but have not yet had any of them published. Maybe that’s because I rarely pull one of those ideas out and say, “Today I am going to knock this into shape as an actual pitch.” No, usually I’m too busy working on something else more important (ie: something I feel more secure about making money from). But that’s not “the world” or “the economy” making that decision, it’s me. The same me that feels disappointed that those features are still unwritten. Well, whose fault is that?

On the flip side, last fall I decided I wanted to be blogging more often… for money. I didn’t make a big honking deal out of writing out all my possible targets and devising the perfect way to pitch myself. I just paid attention to that desire and acted on it right then when I noticed opportunities. A couple months later I had two regular, paid blogging gigs. Then I had the enviable task of choosing between them.

I’m not bragging here, and I’m not getting all “The Secret” on you. Willing something to happen won’t magically make it happen. But if you look at what you spent most of your time working on in the last week, month, year, and it doesn’t seem ideal for whatever reason, the first (only?) way to change that is to stop doing that and start doing something else. Not schedule it, fantasize about it, or analyze it. Just do it. Make your own luck. There is no try. Whatever damn slogan you prefer, the bottom line is: everything is generative. But you have to do the generating.

Happy new year!

Harvest

An essential part of every workday for me. Harvest is a powerful invoicing, time-tracking, and client-management webapp. But as I said in my talk, one of the most important things it does for me is give me an easy, intuitive, instant way to punch in on various tasks throughout the day — ie, own my attention. When you actively choose what you’re going to pay attention to throughout the day, you don’t wonder where the day went.

Merlin Mann’s “Undistraction”

This is just a simple webpage (which I set as my default home page in Chrome, so it pops up every time I launch my browser) that asks: “is this really what you want to be doing right now?” A super-easy way reminder to own your attention as you bounce around ye olde interspheres.

43folders.com

This is Merlin Mann’s home base of operations, where the Mind-Hacker-in-Chief gives helpful, no-b.s. advice on how to know the difference between productivity pr0n and Your Real Work. Mann has a prickly/arch tone that some people love and some people hate, but you can’t deny that he walks the walk as well as talks the talk.

SelfControl.app

A Mac app called Freedom gets a lot of love these days, but SelfControl is better. Instead of being a binary on/off switch for locking yourself off of the internet in order to “get work done,” SelfControl lets you temporarily black out only the sites that you treat like time-wasting crack — and leaves the rest of the internet open. (Or you can whitelist only your bare-minimum work-related sites, and turn off the rest of the internet.) I don’t know about you, but in order to get Real Work done I still need to be online, usually. SelfControl is free, and can’t be deactivated by restarting your computer like Freedom can.

REWORK, by 37signals.com

This is an app in book-form, a miniature “Art of War” for running a lean, mean, profitable, meaningful small business. You can read it cover-to-cover in an hour. Literally everything in it will hack your freelancer-mind for the better. My favorite nugget of their wisdom: Inspiration is perishable. Their company blog, Signal Vs Noise, is great too.

This is Water, by David Foster Wallace

In this slim little book (also readable in an hour or less), Wallace brilliantly expands on the idea that I summarized at the end of my talk: fiddling around with your “productivity” is much, much easier than figuring out how to live meaningfully. The big “why?” questions he attempts to answer (without footnotes or any of his other usual literary tics) are directly applicable to being a successful, happy freelancer. If you don’t wanna buy/borrow the book, an Instapaper-able version is here.

And finally…

Here’s my own humble essay on freelancer mind hacks, working well, living well, and other sundry issues that made Jeff Perkel think I was worth including in his Productivity Panel.

That’s it… now, as Merlin would say, kindly get back to work!

First off, PDF versions of our slide decks:

* Amber’s amazing real-world tips for makin’ $$$ [here]

* Jeffrey’s tremendous tools [here]

* John’s mind hacks [here]

* Christopher’s results of our first ever Freelance Science Writers Survey [here]

A slidecast of our session (ie, a podcast synchronized to our slide presentation, ~65 minutes long) can be viewed here.

The NASW travel fellows’ roundup of our session is available here.

And of course, the complete meeting twitter feed (#sciwri10) is available here.

A final thanks to my copanelists, Amber Dance, Christopher Mims, and John Pavlus, for their tremendous effort over the past 10 months or so, as well as to the NASW program committee for giving us the opportunity to share our ideas with our peers. I’m looking forward to seeing you all next year!

In the meantime, let’s not lose the momentum we established in New Haven, and keep the conversation going on Freelancer Hacks.

Highlights:

* Amber’s amazing real-world tips for makin’ $$$

* Jeffrey’s tremendous tools

* John’s mind hacks

* Results of our first ever Freelance Science Writers Survey. PDF of all the slides presented during this segment here.

(More on that once our volunteer statisticians have crunched the data.)

When Jeffrey first approached me, I thought, OK, show up and give a talk, no big deal. Had I been thinking about my “productivity,” perhaps I should have thought more about what the project entailed! We worked together throughout the process, putting together this blog, discussing each others’ talks, and of course Christopher put together the great survey. I think this fabulous group dynamic helped us have four talks that complemented each other perfectly while inspiring lots of discussion among the group.

It was a pleasure working with you guys! And thanks to all the attendees who contributed their own questions and tips. I wrote down a few resources I definitely want to check out.

If you missed the session, check out the slidecast: http://www.sciencewriters2010.org/content/podcasts-sciencewriters2010

The following survey will only take a few minutes.

Click here to take the freelance science writers survey.

The results, which we’ll reveal on this website and in our ScienceWriters 2010 presentation on Profitable Freelancing, will hopefully afford all of us new insight into how others work and how we might improve.

By the way, we take your privacy very seriously, so this survey is completely anonymous, and the software we’re using – an instance of the open source LimeSurvey – strips all responses of any form of potentially identifying information. In addition, because we’re hosting the survey ourselves, on a machine secured by our sysadmin that is remotely and physically accessible only to him, there’s no chance anyone else will have access to your responses, either. (We don’t even ask for your email address.)

Just a quick post to pass along a new productivity hack, courtesy of friend-of-the-blog and newly crowned co-chair of the NASW Freelance Committee, Siri Carpenter:

I’ve been reading and enjoying your productivity hacks blog. I thought I’d let you know about a productivity hack that I learned about recently and like: the software Freedom, which costs $10. You set it for however many minutes of “freedom” (i.e., from the internet) you want — anything from 15 min to 8 hours. During that time, you can’t go online unless you reboot your computer. I like it a lot, because I find that anytime I’m doing some hard writing, or supposed to be, I have to dedicate a lot of cognitive resources to keeping myself from reading the news or checking email instead. This software removes that cognitive load and allows me to concentrate on what I’ve decided to concentrate on. The other reason I like it is that (unlike with some internet-blocking software) it’s not absolutely impossible to restore your internet access before your time if you really need to. You just need to reboot your computer to do so. For me, that’s a big enough extra step to keep me from being tempted to use it as a cheat.

I haven’t tried Freedom yet, but it is available for both Mac and Windows, and as Siri says, it costs just $10.

Thanks for the tip, Siri, and freelancers, keep ‘em coming! It will all make for a more — ahem — productive session on productivity next month in New Haven!

Journalism, on the other hand, offered the finality of a printed story and a clear sense of accomplishment.

But when is a story done? When you hand over the hard-wrought final draft? When it’s published for your mom and all of the rest of the world to read? Or when you’ve got the paycheck in your hot little hands?

Over the last couple of years, I’ve developed an admittedly elaborate definition of when a story is truly over, and I can stop thinking about it. In what I call my “closing out” process, I check a number of mental boxes to determine it’s really through:

• I sent the invoice, and I got paid.

• The story’s been published. When that happens, I add a copy to my clip book and enter it in my publications list. I routinely go back to these resources when I’m deciding on the most appropriate clips to showcase to a new editor, for example, or when considering stories to enter in a contest. (Or if I’m feeling down, I can just page through past clips and think, my, what a lovely bunch of articles I’ve written. When you’re working by yourself, you’ve got pat yourself on the back now and then!)

• I’ve tweeted the story to my legions (well, thus far, dozens) of followers on Twitter @amberldance.

• I’ve sent the piece to key sources thanking them again for their time.

• I’ve entered all the sources in my electronic address book. I include:
o All the contact info I’ve gathered.
o Why I talked to that person—for what story, at what time.
o Key words that describe their expertise. For example, if I search for “mitochondria,” I immediately find 5 people who know about the organelle and responded to my inquiries in the past.
o Finally, I include what kind of interview the person was. Such as, “This person’s really hard to get a hold of, but worth it when you do,” or “This guy’s a pain—don’t bother,” or “She speaks her mind and doesn’t pull any punches!” So when I do go back to those mitochondria folks, I know who’s my best bet.

• For certain topics that I’m likely to come back to, I save the relevant .pdfs in Papers, noting where I filed the hard copy, so I can find them again without too much difficulty.

Then, and only then, do I consider the story officially “closed.” And then, I file it away in a bottom drawer and the darker recesses of my mind, leaving new space for current stories.

I really like it too: it’s amazing how much less cluttered your mindspace can be if you’re only focusing on one thing at a time onscreen. In fact, I’ve been using this feature for months already on my MacBook Pro, even though it hasn’t been released yet…

Yep, ye olde “maximize window” will do wonders for your concentration. Just click and drag your application window to fill up the screen, et voila! Instant simplicity. (I use Apple-Tab to switch between apps.) The experience may not be as pretty as the one coming in Lion, but you won’t have to buy a whole new OS to get it.

There, I said it! They say the first part of solving a problem is to admit you have one. So, there it is: Check off step 1.

This might seem a strange admission to make just weeks prior to my ScienceWriters2010 session on Productive Freelancing, but that’s okay: I think the whole point of our panel is that each and every one of us, rookies and seasoned veterans alike, can find some process we can do better.

For me, the realization that I was less productive than I thought came via Harvest, a web-based app for time-tracking and invoicing. At the suggestion of copanelist and productivity wonk John Pavlus, I gave Harvest a whirl.

Harvest is a productivity dream. There’s a web interface to track your projects, tasks, invoices, and expenses. There’s a dedicated MacOS dashboard widget, even an iPhone interface. I set up my tasks and projects, and then diligently set to work trying to track my day: 44 minutes to interview so-and-so; 36 minutes to read this paper; a bit more than 3 hours to write that article, and so on.

I felt very accomplished… until I added everything up and found that, despite all my careful tracking, I had gaping holes in my day. Partly, that’s because I didn’t add things like lunch, picking up the kids after school, and the occasional break to check Twitter, Email, and the news. And partly it’s because I’d start reading something and then realize, oops! I forgot to turn on the timer. Still, it’s clear I can do better. It’s not that I thought I was some productivity machine, working 25 hours a day, 8 days a week. But I didn’t realize how much time I was frittering away, either.

On the bright side, my experience provides a concrete example of Pavlus’ theme that it’s not the tools you use, but how you use them, that matters. But it’s also clear that I’ve got a long way to go before I can claim to be as productive as I want to be.

By casting my daily activities in such sharp relief, Harvest helped me identify the problem. It’s up to me to set things right.