I didn’t get to hear the author speak at last week’s conference, but I picked up a copy of Dr. Edward Hallowell’s CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!.

Hallowell applies what he knows about ADHD and ADD to those of us who are going crazy in the digital world.

I LOVE his list of new words for new problems. Here are my top five…

1. Screensucking
   Wasting time engaging with any screen: computer, video game, TV, PDAs. “Held by a mysterious force, a person can sit long after the work has been done…. not especially enjoying what he is doing but not able to disconnect to turn off the machine.”
2. EMV or e-mail voice
   “The unearthly tone a person’s voice takes on when he is reading e-mail while talking to you on the phone.”
3. Gigaguilt
   The major guilt we feel when we are unable to keep track of the million tasks that we think we can accomplish with our high-tech lifestyle.
4. Morning Burst
   Your clearest thinking, freshest time of the day. For most people this is the morning. Hallowell calls the disruption of your clear-thinking time Morning Bust.
5. Fuhgeddomania and Loseophilia
   Forgetfulness due to data overload, and the tendency to lose things because you’re juggling more things than a human brain can manage.
6. Doomdart
   An obligation that slipped your mind that “suddenly pops into your consciousness like a poison dart.”

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.

Update — GET HELP NOW! You need this tool, but you’re not going to like it.

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?

Thursday I received some family news that shook me hard. It’s the kind of news that makes you want to forget about living in exotic places and move home to be near the family.

For the first time since 2006, I was compelled to write… for myself, for my family, out of pure need to express myself.

I wrote a very short essay on Friday to read at a local prose reading on the first Friday of every month.

I literally heard a collective gasp when I finished reading. I looked up, and the audience members were leaning forward in their chairs, several with tears in their eyes. I was crying. By the time the applause died away, I was in the street, releasing the anger and the fear in a torrent of tears. My wonderful friend Erin held me as I shook.

One man was standing by the door, waiting for me as I came back. “Thank you for reading that. It was beautiful,” he said. Others approached me. “My family is going through the same thing.” “I live in fear that something like that will happen to someone close to me.” “That was brave.” “You really touched me.”

My family and I will approach last week’s news one day at a time. It’s something everyone will survive (I have to add an “I hope” here).

But that’s not the point of this post.

I love my job (here’s a small sample of the number of times I’ve said that). I write press releases and white papers and emails for sales people. I make my clients very happy, taking care of jobs they can’t manage, coming up with ideas they don’t have time to think about. It’s a kick, and it makes me very happy and pays the bills every month. I’m quite fortunate.

But no one gasps when they read an article I write for a newsletter. I don’t bring tears to anyone’s eyes or make them laugh aloud. It’s not my job to touch people. The things I write right now don’t bear my name. We give the byline to the VP of sales or the company president.

I want to make people gasp and laugh, cry and want to share my piece with others. I want to write a mystery series with smart women as lead characters, and nonfiction that speaks to the universality of the human experience. I want to touch people and allow them to use my essays as support when things go wrong.

But back to reality, right? Most people can’t make a living as an essayist or novelist. It’s best if I stick with what works.

But let’s examine that thinking for a moment. Before I started my own business as a copywriter, I was convinced that making a living on my own was REALLY HARD and something that only ENTREPRENEURS could do. Turns out it’s not that tough. At one time I thought that people who went to grad school were WAY SMARTER THAN I AM and that I’d never fit in. Turns out I did. And I thought Peace Corps volunteers had some mystical power of giving that I’d never possess. And running a bed and breakfast was something that only really lucky people were able to do. And taking six months to travel around the country was a luxury that I’d never be able to afford.

But it turns out that all these things are doable. Not only that, it turns out all these things are pretty easy once you get over the OH MY GOD CAN I REALLY DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT??!!

What would it take to make the switch? I don’t often plan — I frequently jump. I say to myself, “If you want to make it happen, the only way to make it happen is to make it happen. Today. Now. Before you get too caught up in the fact that it will never happen.”

But I’m not going to do that right now. I wouldn’t drop out to my clients out of the blue. I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. And I’d like to have a book proposal written and accepted by an agent or publisher before I leap. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t or that I’m going to put it off until it becomes one of those dusty things in the closet. It means that I have to remember how those people gasped when I shared a piece of myself, and how I reached them, and how lovely and amazing and right that felt.

So, back to you. Many of you who read here think about your passions and your true calling and how you’d rather spend your days. What will it take to make those dreams come true? How can you convert what you want to do into what you are doing? And why are you waiting? What is your bright treasure?

Sorry for the very personal post. I’ll go back to Avenue Z-ing tomorrow.

PS — the piece on Friday was recorded on audio. I won’t post it, but write me if you want the link when it becomes available.

Since I’ve really become serious about running, I’ve developed what I consider to be killer biceps. I’m happy, but my coach is not. My biceps are an indication that I’m a seriously inefficient runner.

After Coach James’ explanation of how much energy I was wasting by pumping my arms, my thoughts turned to my business. How much energy am I wasting by being an inefficient business owner? What can I do to streamline my processes and tasks to give me more time to work on billable projects?

I’m on a tear now to do two things this fall: finish a marathon in under 5 hours without killing myself and increase my income 25 percent without killing myself. Both of these goals are challenging, and they both require planning that I need to implement right now.

Here are the questions I’m using to try to identify my inefficient business practices:

1. When are my most productive times? Least productive?
   I wake up early every day, but I don’t seem to start billing hours for projects until 2 p.m. or later, when I’m actually getting a little distracted and looking forward to my run. What do I do in the morning? How can I rechannel that energy into billable projects?
2. What can I outsource?
   Which of my daily tasks do *I* have to do? What can someone else take care of? Right now I’m the only one who bills hours, thus I’m the only one who can make money for Avenue Z. So what can I give to my new assistant?
3. What can I abandon?
   Once I take stock of all the little things I do that take up time, I need to look at the list and figure out if each and every item is essential to advancing my company. If something I do is not getting me where I want to be, I need to consciously drop it.
4. Where and when am I marketing?
   I think because I haven’t created a marketing plan with clear outlines of my target audiences, I tend to just kind of jump into any marketing opportunity I see. For example, I receive requests for lunch meetings to discuss ideas with potential partners. I like lunch, of course, but is the partnership really something that would help me? I need to decide before I order appetizers.
5. How can I manage my distractions?
   Email, the stat page on my blog, IMs from friends, my cat, the cupcake vendor across the street…. all these things tend to keep me from getting actual work done. How can I identify them as distractions and figure out where and when I can indulge?

As I read through these questions, the most obvious way to begin to increase my efficiency is to monitor my work habits for three days or so. Starting tomorrow (Wednesday, July 30), I’m going to write down every little thing I do, no matter how small, silly or potentially embarrassing (so sometimes I throw a coat of nail polish on my toes during work hours — doesn’t everybody?). I’m not starting today because I have 3 appointments out of the office all afternoon, which is a little unusual.

I should be able to post the results of my little productivity experiment by Monday…. unless I get distracted.

A few resources:

• 25 Tips to Become More Productive and Happy at Work
• Top 10 Productivity Hacks from zenhabits
• And in case you’re more interested in becoming a better runner: Running Efficiently from Men’s Health