Last week I got a good idea for organising my time from a networking meeting (actually coffee and chat) for people running small businesses. The suggestion was to have a day plan, and stick to it – that probably sounds fairly obvious as a time management tool, but I have to admit I hadn’t thought to do it! The day plan that we …
Greening my signature block
One of things I love about working for myself is that I can take a decision and then implement it, without having to hold a meeting, start a discussion with colleagues or wait for a ruling from someone more senior. Thus, I took an executive decision to add a line to my signature block saying what I was doing to be more ‘sustainable’ …
To publicise or not to publicise …
I haven’t done much to publicise my business, so recently I looked into the idea of making my website more ‘visible’. I wanted my site to be the first to appear if someone searched using a term such as ‘medical editor Australia’ or ‘science editor Australia’. Unfortunately, the quote I received for having this done professionally was way beyond my budget. When I talked to …
What makes a conference worthwhile?
Last Saturday I went up to Sydney to attend a conference for medical writers. I realised while I was there that my criteria for rating a conference as ‘worthwhile’ have changed since I went freelance. As an employee, with all conference expenses paid (including my time if the event was during a working week), my criteria were fairly relaxed. Provided I had a …
Disappearing time
I was going to create a category called ‘Procrastination’, but decided that was just too negative, so went for ‘Staying focused’ instead. I’ve noticed that if I don’t have a looming deadline, it’s remarkably easy for the day to simply disappear without me achieving anything in particular. Sometimes it’s because a supposedly small task turns out not to be small after …
Keeping track
One of my concerns about working for myself was how I would cope with the admin required, given that admin has always been one of my major bugbears. I’ve been pleased to find that doing my own admin is not nearly as onerous as doing admin for an employer. I think it must be something to do with the fact that if …
My real and virtual bookshelves
One of the first things I needed to do as a freelancer was to stock my bookshelves with reference material. I did buy a few books – The Editor’s Companion; the Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers; The Australian Editing Handbook; and The Design Manual. They look nice on my shelves and make me feel like a serious editor, but they were fairly expensive …
Fixing Thunderbird
A success in fixing a software problem has prompted me to finally start blogging about my attempts to set up in business as a freelance science editor – I just had to tell the world what I achieved! Due to my advanced age and my dongle’s slow download speed, I can’t cope with webmail, so I use Outlook for my personal …