I was talking to D.J. this morning. He owns his own business as well, and I mentioned I was amazed that he was never as stressed as I am, even though he’s getting new clients and more business every day.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Just because your client is having an emergency doesn’t mean you have to have an emergency. They waited to come to you, and they can wait until you have time to do what they need done.”

I don’t think I’m ready to apply his philosophy to  my freelance copywriting biz yet. I consider myself a problem solver. I want to be the heroine who rushes in at the last minute to save the writing day. It’s true that many of my clients come to me when they’re in the midst of an emergency. “We have to have the website up and running next week,” said one of my clients on Wednesday of last week. “And I need copy for almost every single page.”

So I tried this weekend to finish four emergency projects. I was able to power through the website and get her 13 pages of copy late yesterday afternoon. On Friday night I pushed and completed a rewrite for a script for a demo that a new client wanted to start production on this Tuesday. A third client has a big project that I haven’t started, but she added on an immediate need for about a hundred ideas for a tagline for her new product line. I did that on Saturday, but I didn’t get to her big project, which is due almost immediately. Thank goodness that today’s a holiday for some people.

A fourth client asked for a resume critique, which I’m doing at $25 a pop to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Most of those critiques I do live so there’s no actual writing, but this person just needs the written feedback. I didn’t get it done, but I did get one live critique done on Saturday as well as an intro to social media for a friend who is starting her own business.

I guess I have two points:

1. Despite my best intentions, most of the time the weekends have a maximum of 10 hours of real work time. On Saturday mornings I run with the marathon team (7 miles this week), and Saturday late afternoon I got caught up in a summer afternoon happy hour here in sunny San Diego. Saturday night and Sunday morning belonged to D.J., so Sunday afternoon I had about 5 hours to work before I needed to workout again.
2. Despite D.J.’s philosophy, I do consider my clients’ emergencies something I need to address right away. If I can’t help them out in a pinch, why would they keep working with me?