Write you are…

It’s ironic (and I mean real irony, not the fake Alanis Morisette kind) that I read The Renegade Writer’s post on how to work less while spending part of my weekend catching up on work. And ouch, did I recognise myself in that. When I tell people I’m freelance, they say things like: “Wow, I’d never get any work done,” or “You must have trouble motivating yourself.” But that’s not true. It’s switching off that’s difficult, and not just because of the amazing motivational power provided by the rent/council tax/gas bill/my Topshop habit/etc.

Maybe that’s because the kind of person who succeeds as a freelancer is, by very definition, self-motivated. There’s getting the work, whether that’s by building relationships or pitching or what. (Mine comes from a mixture of relationship-building, cold-calling, pitching and word of mouth, I think.) And then there’s doing it. You can’t ask your colleague to help you out, or get your boss to give some of your projects to someone else, because there is no boss, and there is no someone else. You may think you’ll say no once you get overloaded, yet you find yourself saying yes all the same.

Plus there’s nothing like working for yourself to bring out your inner workaholic, nothing like an unstructured day in a room by yourself to make you forget to eat lunch, and nothing like the knowledge that if you’re not working, you’re not being paid, to make it very difficult to stop once you’ve got started. The first time I went away for a few days after going freelance, someone called me out of the blue to offer me work and it took all of my self-control not to cancel my trip. Put it this way: I once emailed an editor to accept a commission, from a field. At a music festival. On another continent.

So I’ve been toying with the idea of joining Joanne Mallon in making some freelance resolutions. I tend to believe in a to-do list, rather than Rules You Must Not Break. Goals not guilt (that sounds like it should be on a T-shirt). Last year, my to-do list went something like this: move to London, write more cinema reviews, get into the London Film Festival, do more shifts at newspapers, and crack a very random selection of outlets ranging from Daily Mail Femail to a design magazine.

I did all of that and a lot else besides. I got to tick off a few items on the general list of things I’d like to do, but can’t bring about myself, including getting a Rotten Tomatoes page and being quoted in The Week (about swine flu, of all things). The one thing I didn’t do was crack the women’s glossies, but to be honest, I didn’t really try.

So my to-do list for the coming year – I know it’s February, but I tend to take stock of everything when the financial year ends in April, and I went freelance in May 2008, so really these are early, not late, honest – would probably include:

• 1. Stop work seeping into leisure time. I keep my weekends pretty much sacred but it’s time I got my evenings back.
• 2. Stop faffing about with busy-work and get things done already. In particular, kick the compulsion to just check Facebook/Twitter/etc one more time. This may help with #1.
• 3. Pitch and crack some glossies. I’ve sent the odd pitch and had a couple of almost-bites but got nowhere, so I need to do my homework and keep at it.
• 4. Allow myself to enjoy my work. I don’t think I do this enough.
• 5. Get dressed, eat lunch at a sensible time and stop going to the corner shop wearing a jumper over my pajama top. Oh, you may snigger. But as one of my editors said the other day, getting dressed when you’re self-employed is one of those ideas that are good on paper.