Write you are…

I think I would find it easier to resist the need to constantly check my email if it didn’t rapidly fill up with random crap on a daily basis. Which means I have to spend a long time deleting the useless emails so I can find the important ones buried underneath. I can’t make an email rule for something as intangible as “please delete email I would delete myself if I looked at it, but not anything I wouldn’t”.

I’ve heard people talk about automating the process of filtering out news and information but I don’t like that idea, especially not with email. So instead I’ve been going to the source and asking people to remove me from their mailing lists. I’ve sent some very polite messages explaining I am trying to cut down on email, and I don’t tend to find I can use the stuff they send me, so can they just… not? Most people were happy to take me off – no point mailing someone who doesn’t appreciate it – but a few protested.

Like the person who kept emailing links to his blog. I wrote to him and said thanks but if I want to read a blog I can bookmark it myself so could he stop, as I don’t quite understand why he’s sending them to me. “Probably because you’re a freelance journalist!” came the answer. Huh? When I queried further he said he “thought there was newsworthy stuff”. Maybe there is. But it’s in an area I barely cover and it’s already on the internet. So I don’t know what on earth I’m supposed to do with it.

Next up: someone who kept sending me emails about tech stuff, most of it fairly dull sounding. When I wrote to this PR and said, look, I’m trying to cut down on the email deluge and to be honest I don’t read yours, the reply was: “I thought you were writing about tech? Aren’t you?” Well, aside from the fact that my main tech writing was for Technology Guardian, which closed months ago (thanks for the reminder), the fact I sometimes write about a subject that broad does not mean I’ll automatically find their emails interesting or useful (they were neither).

(Still doesn’t beat the best response I ever got to a polite “Please take me off this list, I don’t write about X.” The reply said they didn’t have time to check out each person they emailed and they paid Gorkana a lot of money for these lists. Spot the flaw in that one.)

Then I started contacting household and financial providers. I was thinking I’d need to make sure they didn’t try to email or secure message me during May. No problems with my internet provider, Be, or my bank. They understood the concept of phoning instead of emailing.

But when I messaged my credit card company to tell them that I wouldn’t be picking up emails or secure messages in May, they wrote back to say they don’t send account info by email but they do communicate with me that way as email and secure message are their “primary form of communication”. So I had to write back and say that’s nice, but I am asking you to not use those as your primary form of communication, as I won’t have internet access, so it won’t be my primary form of receiving them, now will it.

BT couldn’t grasp the situation at all. I explained – via live chat, as I couldn’t find an option to email without lying about what I wanted and didn’t feel like waiting on hold on the phone – that I would not be using email in May. Could they please send any correspondence by post, or phone me. Well why did I think they would contact me about my account, they asked, rather snootily, as if I thought myself excessively important. So I suggested they have a look at the renewal date. It’s in June. May is exactly when they will be contacting me.

Once they figured that out, they said they’d be sending me renewal emails about current offers during the month of May. Right, say I, and I will not be using the internet in the month of May, so I won’t get them. Can you post the information to me, please? Or phone me and tell me what they are? Apparently not. First the advisor said he’d need to turn paper billing back on, losing me my paperless billing discount. Stop right there, I don’t want a paper bill, I said, I just want the content you are going to email to me about my renewal and I don’t want to pay extra just so I can receive it. Then he said he could stop the contract renewal. Again I explained I just wanted information about renewal offers by another medium. Like a telephone. Which, y’know, is something BT are quite familiar with. After a further onslaught of confusing babble I am none the wiser. I ended up saying I’d phone them in May and giving up.

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.