On Taking Sick Days

One of the hardest struggles I have as a freelancer is the ever-present weight of all the work as yet undone.

Even if my client to-do list is empty, I'm left with the unshakable feeling that there is still more to do: if my client task list is done, it must mean I need more clients, or that I should be coming up with new initiatives for current clients, or that I should agree to one more volunteer opportunity with my church.

This summer, the weight of all the work still undone became a very serious drag, and though I plugged along doing the basics for all my clients, I was certainly not in the mood to be seeking out prospects or cooking up new ideas. Thank God the volunteer schedule at church follows the academic calendar, or I would have had to find a way to avoid doing that too.

I realized that what I was missing was a vacation. When you freelance, and especially when you work in social media -- which is round-the-clock -- there is precious little time to step away from the keyboard for days on end.

And I had not built in a cushion so that I could take a vacation without Twitter burning down around me.

When I attempted a week-long vacation with my family around Labor Day, I was saved from my own poor planning by the horrendous and sweeping fires in the western states. We promptly turned around and went home, so I went back to my daily grind as though nothing had happened. I lucked out and didn't have to spend my vacation working, thereby killing any hopes of vacationing.

But it was as we were driving home (the day after driving out), I realized that the only way to get through my achingly endless list of things to do was to tackle each one in turn -- however long it took -- and get it done with room to spare.

It is easy to tread water, and do what is needed daily to keep the wheels of your business churning. But that leaves very little left over in case you need some time off, need a long weekend to relax, or, God forbid, a week day to be flat on your back with a cold.

I've been mentally and physically out of it for 36 hours and counting, and in this time, I've reflected on my general work flow. Here are my thoughts on how to get out of the grind so when you need a day off, you can drink your tea and gallons of soup totally guilt free.

1. Have a plan that is at least 3 months ahead.
That is, assuming you have already moved past the days of having a next week's plan ready this week. Because you have, right? Get out of the immediate future, and start looking far enough ahead that you can build a timeline that you can implement at a moment's notice.

I've been mapping out the entire month for several months now, but that still leaves me scrambling with far too much to do at the end of each month. Now I'm looking forward through the end of the quarter, and building in time to make it happen.

2. Spread out your work flow.
One of my greatest stumbling blocks was getting mentally stuck on the idea that Wednesday was content creation day. This was a hold-over from a previous job, and it worked well in an environment where lots of people were contributing to the process. When it's just me, and I'm doing all the reading, all the writing, and all the scheduling on one day, it was clear that the process did not work for a one-man-operation.

Now that I have killed that particular sacred cow, I do different kinds of content harvesting on different days, so I'm only writing a handful of tweets and posts every day, and still having plenty of time to do other things throughout the day as well.

3. Assign a time and freaking do it already!
So so so many of the projects I have to do just require that I set aside the mental time to map it out and get it done. I have a terrible habit of overestimating how long it will take to do things, and it causes me to put off a lot of the things I need to do until I'm totally under the gun to finish. And things like writing a new blog post for myself are left undone for months, since I'm my only enforcement.

4. Allow yourself the grace to work slowly.
On the flip side of my last piece of advice, we also need to be careful with ourselves and permit ourselves the room to plug along slowly. Release yourself from the guilt of all the things you know you probably should be doing, and just give your whole heart to each project as it comes. Glacial is still a pace, and sometimes you have to be ok with that. We all have those days.