I work from home as a freelance writer, at least that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years. Ghostwriting is the majority of my income or it was until just yesterday when I finished up my last project for a private client. I turned it in two days early and am now preparing for the next phase in my life. I thought long and hard about the stress of the deadlines that were so close it felt like I’d never meet them.
Stress
The stress of it all finally got to me. While there were times when I had time to fit my own work in between the deadlines and appointments other times made it impossible. Feeling a bit of burn out I made the choice to change my work around so that I was only doing my work. I have a busy life and while I do love writing I don’t want to sacrifice everything to make a living.
Weekends
The weekends were usually spent playing catch up with very little time left to do family things such as going to the park or simply sitting down to an uninterrupted dinner. My new schedule or the rather a goal of my new schedule is to free up my weekends. I did this once before but it never last long; this time it is top priority. I have a lot of work to do in my yards that can lead to inspiration for articles and there is always something that my youngest child can learn from.
Our Weekly Appointments
Monday and Wednesday mornings I have to be up no later than 6a.m. because these are preschool days. My baby girl is Autistic and goes to the special education preschool twice a week. Her bus runs at around 8a.m to pick her up and drops her off at around 12;30 in the afternoon. Those two morning I have to get me and her dressed, give her supplements and make sure she has a snack since her special diet means the school isn’t likely to be serving anything that she can have. Monday afternoon I have until 2:30 to get her to speech. Wednesday afternoon I only have until 1:30 to get her to speech so that day is a bit of tighter fit to get her there.
Tuesday mornings we have speech at 10a.m. which means we leave at 9:30 and get home by 11am. Thursdays her appointments start at 12:30 and end at 2pm so we get home at around 3pm. Friday morning we have both speech and ABA back to back. We leave at 9a.m. and don’t get home until around 12:30. It makes for an interesting week when you try to plan deadlines and work time around all of this since only about eight hours out of the week leave me with uninterrupted time to work and clean the house.
Shopping
Shopping for things like groceries, cleaning supplies and other items is often put off until I can’t avoid it anymore. I don’t know what it is about shopping that I find so bad that I try and avoid it now. I think it may be that I no longer have the luxury of spending as much time as I would like finding the things that I actually prefer instead of trying to get just what I need at the moment and getting out as fast as I can.
Since I began my endeavors to see just how far I could cut expenses I usually try to stop at the stores after therapy. When I’ve been good and clip my coupons I go to the local Fred’s on Saturday mornings. That’s when they double coupons so I try and wait to get what few cleaning supplies I need from there.
More Home Therapy and Diets
The biggest benefit of stopping private clients at the moment is that I can rearrange my schedule to be even more flexible than it was before. Even though the youngest has therapy with a total of five different therapists five days a week she still needs more therapy to ensure that she is meeting her goals.
When I have more free time her diet is monitored more closely and she has fewer problems. The stomach aches are lessened, her attention is increased and I don’t have to search through my appointment book just to figure out when we should be doing what.
Conclusion
All in all, I think this is a good move for me at this time. I still haven’t figured out just how much of my own writing I have to do to keep up with expenses but that should only take a few minutes. In fact I can figure it out as I watch today’s therapy session on the monitor. I have a feeling this experience can lead to a lot of articles. Some may just be on the progress that I’ve made since I stopped taking private clients or if I have to take on a private client to get by but an article is an article.
