Category Archives: Time Management

The Crucial Content Writing Step You May Be Skipping

U.S. culture (and many others) valorize hard work. We grow up steeped in the messaging that success is correlated to how hard you’re willing to work, and that developing a skill requires relentless hours of practice. And while that isn’t exactly inaccurate, it’s not the full picture.

For writers—and knowledge workers in general—the quality of your ideas and output depends on finding the right balance between work and rest. Contrary to our cultural narratives, working too hard can hurt your results. And at the same time, it can diminish your quality of life and do serious harm to your health.

This isn’t a personal opinion—it’s backed by research. Taking time for rest doesn’t make you lazy or a bad worker. It’s one of the most commonly overlooked ways to become a better writer. 

5 Ways Rest Will Improve Your Content Writing

 In an ideal world, knowing that rest is important for your physical and mental health would be a good enough reason to make it a priority. In the world we’re all stuck in though, rest is too often associated with personal guilt and/or accusations of laziness. 

In many workplaces, managers will punish employees that take time off, and reward those who put in longer hours. But even for freelancers and business owners that work for ourselves, it’s hard to shake the idea that you’re doing something wrong when you take breaks or give yourself days off. 

So, for those of you that need to hear it: rest doesn’t make you lazy. Instead, scheduling rest—being intentional about it—is a strategic move you can make to improve your business performance. And here’s why. 

1. When you work too hard, your work suffers.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the more hours you work, the more you’ll get done. Actual research has proven that’s not true. Human brains and bodies have their limits. When you try to push yours past those limits, your work suffers. Not only will you produce less, but as your exhaustion increases, the work you do produce will be of lower quality.

The feelings of guilt many of us face when we take time off are illogical. Avoiding overwork isn’t the selfish, indulgent thing to do. It’s the best choice for anyone who cares about producing quality work. 

2. Rest gives creativity room to grow.

If you know many creatives, then you’ve heard anecdotes about the “a ha!” moments that hit when in the shower or on a long walk. That happens for a reason. When you allow the brain periods of rest in between those of intense focus, the brain doesn’t turn off. Instead, a different part of the brain goes to work—a part that excels in creativity*. 

When you’re trying so hard to make progress on a piece—staring at a blank page and just getting nowhere—sometimes the most productive move you can make is to step away and do something entirely different. A walk, exercise, a shower, cooking, playing with your pets—anything that explicitly shifts your mind away from the work. 

It may feel counterintuitive, but letting your mind wander can help you accomplish more than trying to whip it into gear when you’re nearing a breaking point. 

3. Rushed work gets sloppy.

When you overload your calendar, you’ll end up cramming work in when you don’t have the proper time and energy to give to it. Rushed work will be more prone to errors—from minor ones, like embarrassing typos, to bigger issues, such as pieces that lack research and get information wrong (yikes!). 

If you don’t give yourself room to breath with the amount of work you schedule, the mistakes that make it into your pieces will hurt your reputation. And just as bad, they could lead your readers astray in their search for accurate, useful information.

4.     Rest is required to avoid burnout.

Short periods of stress and overwork can take their toll. But once they become your norm, you face the bigger issue of burnout. And once you hit the point of burnout, not only will your health suffer, but you’ll struggle to get anything done. Work goes from feeling challenging to impossible. You go from being worn out at the end of the day, to tired all the time. And motivation will feel entirely out of reach.

In short, burnout is serious and best avoided. To keep from reaching that point and facing all the personal and career consequences that come with it, you need to start prioritizing rest before the days and weeks of overwork pile up to the point where it’s too late. 

5.     All work and no play makes you dull.

Unless you’re staying at a secluded, haunted hotel throughout the winter, working too hard probably won’t make you a murderer. But it does risk making you less relatable, which matters when it comes to writing. Interacting with friends and family members can produce insights you won’t get while sitting at your computer. Spending time reading books, watching movies, and following current events will keep you learning.

And the experiences you have while living life (away from work) will often come back in surprising ways that make your writing better. Maybe something that happens while walking your dog becomes the perfect anecdote to start a piece with, or a friend’s comment at a party sparks a great topic to tackle on your blog.

When all you ever do and think about is work, you lose insight into a lot of the things your audience cares about. Keeping in touch with the culture outside of your job helps you keep your writing interesting and authentic. 

How to Intentionally Incorporate Rest into Your Work

Now that you have strong arguments for abolishing any guilt or hesitation you may have felt about adding more rest into your life, you need to develop specific strategies to make sure it happens. 

1. Schedule in breaks.

When you’re busy (which most of us are most of the time), the idea of including a break in your day may feel impossible. But that’s why it’s important to intentionally schedule it. Treat it like a task that’s as important as any other item on your to-do list (because it is). The breaks you include in your day will make the time you spend focusing on work more productive. 

And by being more intentional about the breaks you take, you’ll likely find you spend less time on unintentional breaks <cough> Twitter/Facebook/Instagram <cough>. And that means you can spend your breaks doing something you actually like. Doesn’t a walk in your neighborhood sound nicer than another twenty minutes of doomscrolling? 

2. Enforce a strict line between the workday and your personal life.

Make a rule for yourself right now: when you’re done with work for the day, you’re done. No checking email on your phone while you watch TV, or taking business calls that come in while you’re trying to have dinner with family. To truly get the benefits of rest, you need time where you’re psychologically detached from your work. And a voice in the back of your head urging you to check your work email just in case will keep you from that.

You’re a writer, not an OB-GYN with clients that could go into labor at any moment (or at least, if a client does go into labor, that’s very much not your responsibility!). This isn’t a job where time-sensitive emergencies are the norm. You don’t need to be on call to do your job well. And in fact, you’ll do your job better if you let yourself be all the way off when you’re not working. 

3. Take weekends (or something comparable).

For freelancers and agency owners, the line between the workweek and weekend can get blurry. But it’s important to have full days off regularly. 

If you find that you prefer to take Mondays and Thursdays off to Saturdays and Sundays, that’s fine! The particulars matter less than the idea. But don’t try to work seven days a week. Make sure you leave yourself weekends to rest, spend time with loved ones, and pursue any hobbies you’re into. 

4. Commit to regular vacations.

If you’re employed, use your vacation time! Don’t feel bad using the benefit you’ve earned. And don’t feel like you need to keep an eye on your email while you’re gone.

Note: I recognize that If you have an employer that requires this, you may not have much of a choice. But to the degree possible, leave work behind completely. And if you don’t have that option now, seriously consider looking for an employer who respects the value of rest.

If you work for yourself, make scheduling vacations a priority. Something a lot of people don’t realize about freelancing until they’re in it is that somehow it becomes harder to take time off when you control your own schedule. Many freelancers fall into the trap of forgetting to take vacation, or feeling like they can’t for the first few years (hi, it me). That’s a surefire path to burnout.

Communicate with your clients in advance and schedule all your deadlines to make sure they won’t interfere with the time you’ve allotted for your vacation. It really is OK to put an out-of-office message up and leave work behind for a week or two. The alternative is the real danger to your career. 

5. Get comfortable saying “no” (and “not now”).

For everything else on this list to be possible without burning bridges and disappointing people, you need to avoid overcommitting. That means getting really good at using a small and simple word that is surprisingly difficult to say: no. 

Don’t feel like you have to agree to everything a boss asks you to do. Don’t think you have to take on every project a client offers. Getting comfortable with saying “I don’t have the space in my calendar for that right now” takes work, but it’s important. And saying “no” doesn’t make you unprofessional. A lot of people will respect you more for showing that you know how to schedule effectively, set realistic expectations, and communicate boundaries.

Sometimes saying “no” outright is important. Other times saying “I can’t fit that in now, but could slot it in X weeks from now” will do the trick. Get in the habit of figuring out how much you can manage without going overboard, and protecting your schedule from going beyond that. 

Conclusion

The internet is packed with articles about productivity hacks. But a lot of them miss this crucial part of the equation. If you’re not taking enough breaks, getting enough sleep, and keeping portions of your life entirely work-free, your productivity will dip. Your work will suffer. And you’ll hit a wall where you just can’t keep it up any more. 

For the good of your personal life, your health, and your writing—take a break. 

*If you want to know all the sciency stuff behind this, you can find it in the chapter on “The Problem of Rest” in the book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. It also has sections that cover a lot of the research referenced elsewhere throughout the post. [jump back up]

How to Avoid Content Writing Burnout

When a company embarks on a content marketing program, they often don’t realize just how hard creating great content is. Writing is a high-energy activity. It takes a lot of time, thought, and effort.

Research bears this out:

  • Orbit Media’s blogger survey has found the average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write.
  • Yet research into modern work habits has found the average knowledge worker is only productive 3 hours a day. The specific number of good writing hours you can get in a day will vary for different people, but there’s a hard limit for everybody (and I’d be genuinely shocked to meet someone who can do 8). 
  • HubSpot research reveals a clear relationship between blogging frequency and getting results. More blog posts = more website traffic. 

So, if you need to write a lot of blog posts, each post takes over 3 hours, and you only get around 3 good writing hours in a day for each content creator on your team—well, I’m a writer not a math person, so let’s just say it probably doesn’t add up well for most businesses. 

Content Writing Burnout is a Serious Problem

Burnout isn’t just about feeling tired, it’s a genuine health issue. If you overwork yourself for too long, it can lead to an array of health problems in the long term. But if protecting your health isn’t enough incentive, burnout will also hurt your work product. Good writing requires creativity and energy. Someone trying to crank out words while exhausted doesn’t have much of either to work with.

Avoiding content writing burnout is important both your team’s general well being, and to continue creating valuable content that gets results. 

How to Protect Yourself from Content Writing Burnout

There are no shortcuts in content marketing. To get results, you have to put in the work. So how can you do that without burning out? Mostly by working smarter, rather than harder. 

1.  Be strategic.

A strategy doesn’t just help you do better content marketing, it also helps you figure out your priorities. Someone who tries to do everything will burn out faster than someone who thinks carefully about which tactics and topics to tackle to get the best results.

Take time to learn who your audience is, what they care about, and how they learn about and consume content online. You’ll still want to do testing to see what works best, and be willing to change up the strategy you create based on the results you get. But being strategic will help you cut down on the total amount of work you do, since you’ll know where to focus your energies for the best results. 

2. Keep your goals realistic.

A lot of people don’t realize how much work creating content is until they start trying to do it regularly. Setting goals that require more writing than your team is capable of is a sure recipe for disappointment and burnout.

If the most you can reasonably create is one blog post a week and an ebook every other month, then don’t aim for two posts a day and an ebook every week. Make sure you give yourself and your team the time you need to do quality work, it’s not good for anyone if you put out rushed, sloppy pieces.

Create a content marketing calendar that helps you plan out realistic timelines for all your content pieces, and keeps you consistent in getting great content out there. 

3. Keep a swipe file.

Content marketing requires creating new, original content on an ongoing basis. At some point, you’re going to hit up against the challenge of figuring out what to write about. Having a strategy will help with that, since researching keywords, competitors, and your audience usually leads to healthy list of topic ideas.

But you don’t want to reach a day where you run through the list and get to the end. To avoid that fate, keep a swipe file. This is a folder or document where you save other good ideas you see around the web. Any time you’re doing research, browsing the web, shopping, or just going about your life and you see something you like, save it. Over time, you’ll have a file full of links, screen shots, and hastily scribbled notes you can turn to for inspiration.

When it’s time to fill in your content marketing calendar with new ideas, your swipe file will keep them flowing. 

4. Create outlines before writing.

Staring at a blank page is a notoriously frustrating experience for writers.

You know what’s easier than starting to write from scratch? Creating an outline. Then you’re not faced with a blank page when writing time comes, you already have your structure and basic ideas in place. 

Creating an outline not only makes content writing easier, it also makes the end result stronger. It forces you to do research and organize your thoughts before you start putting words on the page. Organization at the front end produces a piece that will be more intuitive and readable on the user end. 

5. Figure out your best process.

Writing productivity isn’t one size fits all. Each content writer will have to figure out for themselves what process most efficiently leads to good work. Analyze your working style carefully and try out a few different ways of approaching the creative process to see what works best for you. 

Some techniques worth trying are:

  • The Pomodoro Technique
  • Batching your blog posts or outlines (i.e. doing a bunch all at once)
  • Identifying your most productive time of day and scheduling all your writing work within that time
  • Creating mini-milestones to work toward to keep a big project moving

Track your time as you try out different techniques and see which ones lead to getting more writing done in less time. 

6. Take breaks.

When you’re overwhelmed and looking at a to-do list for the day that’s still far too long, taking a break feels like the last thing you should do. But breaks aren’t something to feel guilty about. They’re a necessary part of the creative process. And more than that, they’re proven to improve productivity.

Taking more breaks can mean getting more writing done.

If you’re not intentional about breaks, your brain will probably force them on you. Ever find yourself scrolling Facebook when you’re stressed out and have a million other things you should be doing? 

Instead, schedule breaks into your day intentionally, and find ways to use them that help energize you. For me, an exercise break inevitably translates into more productivity in the hours afterward. For you, a nap or a few minutes of meditation may do the same. This is one of those things to test out when figuring out your best process. 

7. Outsource.

No matter what hacks you use to get more content out of the time and energy you have available, you’re human and can only accomplish so much on your own. The most important step to avoid content writing burnout is recognizing when your team is overwhelmed. At that point, you can either scale back (which will likely mean slowing down your results), or you can outsource. 

An overworked, stressed out team is a good reason to hire a freelance content writer. Someone who specializes in content marketing writing will take some of the work off your to do list, and deliver work that helps you meet your goals. 

Avoiding Burnout = Better Content

Don’t work your team to the point of exhaustion. You’re much better off expanding your team with a skilled, capable freelancer (or a few) who lighten the load. 

If you’re ready to find the right freelancer for your needs, check out how I work and get in touch to see if we’re a fit. 

Unpopular Opinion: Why I Don’t Have an Email List

Why I Don't Have an Email ListIf you spend any time at all doing, researching, or thinking about content marketing you hear people talk about the importance of the list. Almost of all of the best marketing blogs sing the praises of the email list as a crucial component of building a successful business.

Copyblogger says: “Every successful online marketer we’ve talked with agrees — email readers are more responsive, they have a tighter connection with you, and they buy more stuff. ”

In an ebook thoroughly devoted to the subject, Hubspot says: “The size of your email list is a demonstration of your reach and thought leadership.”

Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing says: “Sure, Twitter, Facebook and RSS can be nice, but there’s just no comparing them to the raw power that comes with invited access to your prospect’s inbox.”

Joe Pulizzi, the very man who coined the term “content marketing” says: “There’s no Holy Grail to content marketing, but if there was one, it would be the email subscriber.”

If you google the term “the money’s in the list” you get page after page of articles from expert marketers insisting on the importance of building an email list.

As a content marketing copywriter, I know all the “rules” – the widely regarded best practices we’re all supposed to be following. Yet you’ve almost certainly noticed by now that there’s no email sign-up box in the sidebar. This is one of the golden rules of content marketing and yet I don’t personally follow it.

So….Why?

I don’t believe any of those quotes I cited up above are wrong. Those are some of the best minds in the biz and I’d be quick to share similar advice with many clients.

The reason I don’t follow this advice myself isn’t because I think it’s bad advice, it’s because it’s just not right for my business.

We’re All Different

Every business has distinct goals and priorities when it comes to content marketing. And every business must make choices when it comes time to decide where to spend time and money.

Like every other marketer and business owner in the world I have a loooooong mental list of different techniques and tactics I’d love to try for my business if only there were endless hours in each day. Like everyone else, I know I can’t accomplish them all and have to prioritize.

How I Prioritize

I’m just one person and my goals for the future of my business don’t include growing it beyond one person. That puts some serious limitations on the time I can spend on marketing, so I have to stick with the most efficient tactics for my purposes. These include (but aren’t necessarily limited to):

  • Networking. Both locally, at conferences, and online.
  • Guest posting to raise my online profile and demonstrate my abilities to a new audience.
  • Participating in social media with the goal of making new connections there.
  • Writing posts (like this one!) on my own blog to share my knowledge with readers and demonstrate my abilities to anyone who visits my site.

It’s a short list but, combined with my responsibilities to clients, it sure keeps me busy.

At the end of the day, all content marketing tactics come back around to the goal of making connections. The way you do it matters less than the results. For me, the activities I listed above work for what I want and need (and can accomplish) in my business.

The best strategy for your business will necessarily be different.

How to Make Your Procrastination Productive

Productive procrastination might sound like an oxymoron, but with the right approach you can make those unfocused hours work for you.

We all have off days. There are times when our minds are intent on focusing on just about anything that’s not the main item on our to do list. If you’re stuck in one of those periods where your brain just will not listen to reason and face the task you need to tackle, think strategically about how you can still get something accomplished during your distracted state.

1. Switch to one of the lower energy items on your to do list.

It’s rare that everything you need to get done requires the same amount of mental energy. Maybe you have some accounting you’ve been neglecting, or a spreadsheet of contacts you’ve been working on filling in. If there’s something you can work on that requires less active thought than the main work you have to do that day, focus on it first. Once you’ve actually gotten something else done, you might find that your mind is more prepared for the larger tasks you weren’t previously up for.

2. Spend that time on research and social networking.

You can always be learning more, regardless of what kind of work you do. If you spend a little time on your favorite business blogs, or interacting with professional contacts on your social networks, you can do something useful that actually feels a little like procrastination. Just don’t let yourself get stuck on Twitter or Facebook focusing on things that don’t relate to your work. Set a timer to let you know when it’s time to switch back over to other forms of work.

3. Find a way to get started on that intimidating, looming task without diving right in.

Maybe you’re trying to write an article and instead are stuck staring at a blank page. Stop unsuccessfully trying to get that intro paragraph down and focus instead on working up an outline, or just writing down some sloppy, brainstormed ideas to get the juices flowing. Often the biggest barrier to getting started is the sense of just how much you have to do. If you can find a way to ease into starting, you can overcome the main psychological barrier keeping that page blank.

4. Plan your days to get the most out of your active hours.

Sometimes we have off days, but most people also have certain times in each day that they’re less mentally alert. For me, it’s usually the hour or so after I eat lunch. Maybe for you, it’s the beginning of the day when you’re still waking up, or late afternoon when you’re just itching to be done. Pay attention to your work habits and, once you’ve identified your weak period, leave some of those lower-energy work items to focus on at that time.

5. Take a break to let yourself think.

If I’m overwhelmed by a project, facing it directly doesn’t necessarily work. To think more clearly about it and how to best approach it, I need to walk away for a little while. Whether that’s a literal walk, a long bath, or spending a little time cooking or cleaning, I’ll often find that by spending my time doing something that leaves room to think, I’ll come back to work with a better plan for accomplishing what I need to.

The Case for Telecommuting

Generally speaking, the business world is moving toward offering workers greater flexibility and embracing remote work. There are a number of reasons why.

The ban on allowing Yahoo employees to work from home has garnered a lot of attention, most of it negative. For many individuals who have had the experience of working from home, and for many businesses that have made more flexible options available to workers, the move looks like a big step back. When a large-scale tech company in an industry that values being on the cutting edge moves in the opposite direction of progress, people will definitely have loud opinions on the subject.

Marissa Mayer isn’t the only person who associates working from home with lower productivity, but for many it’s a snap judgement based on bias rather than evidence.

Telecommuting has a wide variety of benefits that make it a good tool for attracting talent, keeping workers happy, and, often, getting better work out of people. Here’s why:

1. It shows you trust the people working for you.

When you send the signal in a workplace environment that you don’t feel the people working for you can be trusted to do their jobs without supervision and micromanagement, you’re insulting them. In many cases, people will behave the way they’re expected to. If a business doesn’t show respect and trust to its workers, there’s a good chance they’ll care less about the work they do.

2. It’s good for the environment.

This pretty well speaks for itself. The less people driving long distances or sitting in traffic every day, the better for all of us.

3. Time saved increases productivity.

Someone who saves, say, half an hour each day or more by skipping the commute is able to choose a more productive way to spend that time. Whether that means getting started on work earlier, or doing some exercise (which will help improve energy levels), the result is likely to be an improvement for both the business and the individual.

4. It’s just as easy to procrastinate in an office as it is at home.

The distractions may differ, but they’re still there. Whether it’s chatting with co-workers, attending to the needs of family, or browsing the web, there will always be something to distract from a full 8-hour day of work. The fact is, where you’re located has little to do with how likely you are to procrastinate.

5. Spending more hours “working” in an office isn’t necessarily more productive.

There’s clear evidence that longer workweeks don’t mean more work gets done – they just leave people more tired. If part of the concern about allowing people to work from home is that they’ll spend less time doing work, who cares? If an individual’s productivity drops, talk to that individual to figure out the cause. It’s lazy to blame it on a system that works well for many.

6. You can choose the best talent.

If you’re open to hiring people regardless of where they live, you can pick the best of the best. If you’re only open to working with people within driving distance of your offices, or willing to move for the position, you lose out on a lot of good potential candidates.

7. It’s easier to take less sick and vacation days.

It’s a lot easier to get a little work in when you’re not feeling well, in between naps and bowls of soup, if you’re able to sit a computer on your lap in bed. It’s also easier to make trips to spend needed time with out-of-town friends and family without leaving all of your work behind. The lines between work time and personal time blur a bit when you have more choice in which is which. For some, that wouldn’t be seen as a benefit, but it makes it easier to work during the times you know you’re most productive, and take off the times you’re not, which equals greater efficiency overall.

8. The technology’s available to make communication as easy as it needs to be.

Skype is free. Google + Hangouts are free. It’s easy to check email and take phone calls anywhere you need to. A lack of communication is no longer the excuse it once was, there are businesses that are 100% virtual with no problem.

9. When you treat people like responsible adults, they tend to act like it.

If you give people reasons to care about their job, they’ll be inclined to do it well. Somebody who works best from home and appreciates the added benefits it affords has a good incentive to do good work in order to keep up the lifestyle they enjoy. Someone who’s unhappy in their job, or stressed out by a lack of work-life balance, isn’t likely to put in the same level of effort.

Working from home isn’t for everybody, but allowing it as an option for those it does work well for can benefit all involved.