It’s 8:14 p.m. here in San Diego, and I just sent my one-page companion flyer to my clients on the East Coast. That was the last thing on my To-Do List from this morning, except I didn’t get to planning the next marketing campaign.

What I did for 13 hours:, wrote two articles and a one-page flyer, put together a survey and sent it to a couple thousand people, followed up with a couple of clients, pinged a couple of potential clients, wrote two invoices, plus dealt with a handful of little things with my former company (I am still closing out there).

I worked hard — very hard — with just a small break to make pasta for lunch and another to sit on my steps in the sunshine and eat an apple.

The question is — am I working hard enough to make a living? I’m still scared to ask for too much money. I’m afraid people will scoff, even though it seems the hourly rates are pretty standard.

Copywriting Guru Peter Bowerman, author of The Well-Fed Writer, offers this advice for helping you understand how to make ends meet.

I decided that I wanted to make $100,000 this year. Now just saying “I’m going to
make 100k a year” is like trying to fit a whole pizza in your mouth at once.
You need to break it down into more manageable bite-size pieces. So, I created
a chart on my computer, which looked like this:

$100,000
a year
$8000 a month
$2000 a week
$400 a day
Where’s the $400 coming from today?

I made a few copies of it, put one on my bathroom mirror and tacked another up on
the wall next to my computer. I read the chart out loud to myself in the mirror
for one minute in the morning and another minute at night before bed. Just
having this sheet of paper to focus on made a huge difference.

I tried to do like Peter Bowerman, who is indeed now a very Well-Fed Writer. But every time I think about how much I actually have to make each and every day just to make it, I freeze up.

I’m kind of in Scarlet O’Hara, “I’ll think about that tomorrow” mode. For right now, I’m happy that I’m busy and that I don’t really have time to sit around and worry so much about money (it was #4 on my list).