If you’re a creative entrepreneur like me, you know how difficult it is to open up space in your day/week/month for business tasks. Client projects take precedence, of course, and we get busy and pretty soon we lose sight of the work we need to do for ourselves.
Even now, a year into running my own small writing business, I have difficulty allocating time to the real and necessary work of building my business. Somehow, I equate those non-billable hours with unproductive time. But I’m determined to get over my anxiety about doing work for ME—and right now is the perfect time to do that.
I returned from the awesome Creative Freelancer Conference two weeks ago with a notebook full of to-do items, none of which are client projects. This lengthy agenda, combined with a new website that I need to publicly launch, coincides perfectly with a midsummer slowdown in client work. I anticipated this slow period several weeks ago, and decided that I’d allocate my billable time for the next 2 weeks to myself as the client. I’ve blocked time on my agenda to write a newsletter, to add content to this blog, to update my contact list. I plan to revise my business papers, update my financial records, generate a list of SEO keywords. Thanks to CFC speakers like Allen Murabayashi, Patrick McNeil and David Baker, I have a lot of things to work on.
It takes time to build a steady stream of work, and I’m experiencing the busy/slow cycle that many creative entrepreneurs face. I’m getting better at anticipating those slow times so that I can make excellent use of those days and hours.
This morning, I was lamenting that I don’t have a client project starting this week. Rob said, “Relax. Just be glad you have time to focus on growing your business.” Indeed.
photo by wwarby, used under Creative Commons License