The Importance of Making Time for Your Personal Projects

This year I’ve committed to making time for a couple of important personal writing projects. One has the potential to become a source of residual income, which has also been a long-term freelance writing goal of mine for some time. Finding time to devote to these projects while also keeping up with client projects and the marketing required to keep the lights on and food on the table can be a serious challenge.

These projects are a part of my business plan, so although I don’t rely on them (yet) to cover my living expenses, there will be a payoff in the future if I stick to my plan. Yes, I need to generate a consistent income, but I don’t want to cheat myself out of a promising long-term opportunity for short-term cash. Based on the research I’ve conducted, passive income can help stabilize and increase a freelance writer’s income which reduces those feast or famine cycles.

In the past I’ve been guilty of setting aside my personal writing projects for client projects, and the result was that my projects eventually fell to the wayside. Someday will never arrive unless I take active steps to make it happen. Whether you have dreams of writing a novel, creating information products, classes, webinars or some other project that could financially benefit your business, you’ll have to make time for it. Think of it this way : you are your most valuable client, so you deserve to be treated as such. I’ll share a few things I’m doing to meet my personal project goals:

Setting Aside Time Each Week

As you know I’m the mother of four children, and I freelance full-time. This requires me to create and work on a schedule. I make sure to also schedule time for working on my personal projects.

Setting Deadlines

Deadlines are serious business for me. If I set a deadline I do everything in my power to meet it. Setting deadlines forces me to move beyond the idea stage and start taking the actionable steps required to turn my dreams into reality.

Not Getting Caught Up In the Perfection Trap

I am sooo bad about this. I want everything to be perfect or I don’t want to do it. But it’s not so much about my project being absolutely perfect as much as it is about me on some level doubting my ability. I have to remind myself that I’m human, everything may not be perfect in the beginning, but I can’t allow self-doubt to hold me back from trying.

Have you been working on, or thinking about working on a personal project that could financially benefit your business? How do you keep yourself on task?

Taking Back the Weekend

I am coming off a much needed four day break from working. It just so happened to coincide with the Fourth of July Holiday even though I didn’t plan it that way. I just really needed some time to rest and recover.

Lately I’ve been allowing client work to invade my weekends (something I try never to do unless I’m working on my own personal projects). This is a dangerous precedent I can’t afford to establish if I value my free time and my health. I’ve visited blogs where other writers regularly discuss how they work seven full days a week. I can see how easy it might be to slip into that pattern if you’re not careful.

Stop being available on the weekends. I got sucked back into working weekends when I took on a very large ebook project and unthinkingly responded to a weekend email message which turned into a series of back and forth messages. From that moment on, my client assumed nothing in my life was more important than her ebook. To some degree I want my clients to feel that way, but within reason. It’s my job to establish professional boundaries. Even though flexibility allows me to work when I please, I’ve learn from past experience that making myself too available to some clients has backfired giving them the impression that all I do 24/7 is write web content, ebooks, sales letters, etc.

Pursue higher paying clients. This is a no brainer – it allows me to earn the income I need without feeling as if I need to work 10 hours a day seven days a week. This means putting forth time to search out clients who value your writing services and are therefore prepared to pay your rate.

Establish passive income sources. I’ve discussed my desire to establish a few passive income sources in addition to my freelance writing. It’s a part of the multiple streams of income I’m working to develop. Knowing that I still have the ability to earn money, even when I take time off. I’ve actually started a couple of side projects I’ll continue working on to build and monitor the residual income.

Hopefully these objectives will keep me from slipping into constant work mode so that I can go back to enjoying my much needed time off with my family.

Spreading the Wealth

I've talked about finding ways to create a residual income here before, but now I'm actually taking steps to do it. There are lots of writers out there making money from more than their client projects. Some writers write books and receive royalties; others write ebooks and reports, create and monetize niche websites and blogs.

Building "passive" income

This income is anything but passive considering the time and energy that needs to go into creating the final product. The fact that it can continue to make money long after you've created it is the lovely thing about it. This combines well with everyday client projects.

Write for yourself

Some writers say their "passive" income has grown so much that they have the luxury of scaling back on client projects. They can spend the majority of their time writing for themselves. Beautiful.

Have you made any effort to create a passive income with your own projects, or is it something you've ever considered?