After a thorough examination of the way I spend my days, I’ve discovered some large disconnects between what I think I’m capable of doing in a day and what I actually get done. These challenges seem to be inherent in day-to-day life of freelancers, so I’ll share.

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1. Discover your Dead Zone
   As I meticulously recorded my activities last week, I noticed weird entries between noon and three: “read blogs, answered emails, … did stuff.” What the heck was that stuff? What I actually discovered was my Dead Zone, a persistent period of time each day that I just floated, billing no hours. I once called this the Idiot Hour.
   The Remedy: I started scheduling meetings — phone and in person — during my Dead Zone. This at least gave me billable hours during those times and kept me on track for my daily billing goals.
2. Manage your phone calls and meetings
   Here’s what happens… your little reminder comes up to tell you that you have a meeting in 15 minutes. So you stop working. If you have a meeting 30 minutes after the first one, you don’t get back to billable work until after your second meeting. And if the meeting is late or canceled, you don’t dive back into billable work. You can waste 30 minutes on either side of a meeting if you’re not careful.
   The Remedy: Schedule meetings in clusters so you’re not constantly ducking in and out of calls. If you schedule them back to back, you’ll also manage the length of each call so you don’t get too chatty.
3. Turn off IM and hide your cell
   It’s so very, very easy to get caught up in conversations with friends when there’s no boss looking over your shoulder. But, as a freelance writer, I am the boss. I know when I’m not being productive, when I am surfing the web or sending funny links to friends instead of working.
   The Remedy: Give yourself time to interact with friends, but don’t get carried away. Fifteen minutes of funnies is fine… 45 minutes is not.
4. Rethink what constitutes “work”
   In my business plan (you know, the one I haven’t written yet), this blog plays an important role. Thus, when I’m blogging, I’m working. When I’m answering emails, I’m marketing, networking, connecting. That’s work as well. No, I can’t bill those hours to anyone, but those jobs are a part of running Avenue Z Writing Solutions, and I have to plan them into any day.
   The Remedy: Figure out what YOU have to do vs. what has to be done. Can you outsource some parts of your basic business activity? I just hired an assistant to help with some things that have to get done but not necessarily by me.
5. Understand your limitations
   Although I would like to be more productive throughout the day, my observations over the last few days have helped me realize that I am not really capable of billing an 8-hour day. There’s a reason I come across a Dead Zone — the work that I do can be pretty intense: concentrated thinking, meticulous editing, focused word selection. Perhaps I can bill an extra 30 minutes a day, but an extra hour? Two? It doesn’t seem likely. At a party earlier this week, I meet a freelance designer. She said she can work 6 hours, no problem. But she clarified — she can work 6 hours when she’s in production mode. When she’s conceptualizing and thinking, she can focus for 2-3 hours max. As a writer, I’m rarely in “production mode.” Sometimes I have to take one email and tweak it for three audiences, but those tweaks don’t take hours — they take minutes. So I rarely have projects I can just plow through for hour after hour.
   The Remedy: Even if you’ve reached your peak in terms of hard-thinking hours per day, you can still grow your business. How can you create services that have more value? What other ways can you use your time to increase billable hours (like the phone calls)?

What are your biggest time wasters? What did I miss?