I have had 9-5 desk jobs only sporadically in my life. I successfully avoided that fate by hiding out in grad school and in academia most of the time. I certainly never did a job like Steve, which involves being glued to a chair for nine hours per day. Darling husband is a martyr to our mortgage.
Working from home has its advantages, but it also involves a great deal of discipline and internal rules. Deviate from those rules, and it's a slippery slope down to crazy-land.
One of my rules is that the paying gig comes first. I write best in the morning, so now that Ian's gray van has picked him for school and Steve has driven Jonah to school for extra math help, I really should be working on the freelance article.
I dashed off 500 words yesterday about the impending cuts in education. The article really demanded some fucking pie charts, but I sent it off without the fucking pie charts and a note to the editor to tell me if wanted some fucking pie charts. He wants the fucking pie charts. I spent an hour searching the web for some pre-existing pie charts and couldn't find anything that was accurate, so now I have to put some numbers in Excel and make my own fucking pie charts.
I'm stalling here. And violating one of the rules, which is the paying gig comes before blogging.
Other rules that have developed over time include no reading novels during the day, no TV watching, no video games other than really dumb ones that only take up five minutes here and there. All writing and Internet surfing must end up noon. The three hours before the kids come home are for the gym and chores. Once a week, I must have lunch with my sister or friends, because you need interaction with real people, so you don't end up in crazy-land.
I've been doing a lot of rule breaking lately. Yesterday, I read Angela's Ashes all day. I haven't been to the gym in several days.
I need to get myself together here and make the fucking pie-charts.
Apt. 11d 
Damn we could have had lunch!
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There are pie charts, and there are fucking pie charts. Oh how I love you for getting that distinction.
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You’re so right that it’s all about discipline. The hardest part of being at home, whether you’re a full time parent and holder down of the family fort or a full time worker or something in between is that you are the master of your own time. It sounds nice, but it’s really, really hard work – almost like another job added on top of the others.
I’ve been home for 10 years this June – parenting and writing – and I feel my stamina for the discipline piece really slipping of late, making me feel it’s time to get back out into the world more and have some structure to my days that is not strictly self-imposed. Scary to give up the control and flexibility. But honestly, all that control and flexibility has begun to make me feel pretty rudderless, at least professionally. It’ll be a challenge and a true reinvention of my life to get back into the swing of working somewhere other than at home. But I think I need to do it.
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Give the editor a table with nice consistent data, because Graphics is going to have to rebuild your charts no matter what. Authors, as a general rule, cannot make graphs for shit, and should not be encouraged/required to do so. Do not meddle in the affairs of designers, for they are subtle and quick to wig out.
Otherwise, your rules are good; something very similar kept me going for six freelance years.
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And this is where that graduate school background comes in handy because the persistence it takes to finish a fucking dissertation is the same that is required in making fucking pie charts.
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No one else likes the pie charts? They’re my favorite part (well, except for the pie chart part — I usually like other kinds of graphs, usually ones that go just over the top with color coding and packing too many kinds of information into one graph, with derived numbers that only a few people understand, think the hockey stick graph, for example, but color coded).
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You can have my Tufte when you’ve pried it from my cold, dead hands, but the fact remains that making good graphs is a skill that relatively few authors possess.
Just as you don’t want the graphics people writing your headlines, subheads, summaries or captions, you don’t want most writers trying to put information together graphically.
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I had to get that program Freedom and put it on my computer. It locks you out of the internet. I have absolutely no internal discipline.
I’m big on the: write those 1000 words first thing in the morning. No coffee or food until you do. Set specific times for things like walking the dog and making dinner or else you’ll putz around all day.
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Never offer the pie charts because the editor will nearly always say yes please. 🙂
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Louisa, how can you write BEFORE coffee? I bow to you.
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Apparently coffee is what wakes up the critical part of my brain. I actually write in a much less stressed out, self-critical fashion if I do the writing before I am fully awake. I am somehow able to engage with the IR theory stuff without engaging with the other questions — like how will this be perceived? Will so and so get angry if I say he’s completely off-base in the way he interprets this concept? etc. Took a lot of experimenting to figure that out.
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Confession: When I’m later drafts into an article and doing some fairly simple revising, I am far more productive watching reruns of The Rachel Zoe Project, Project Runway, or The Millionaire Matchmaker.
Scout’s Honor.
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Those are good rules. I’m going stir crazy right now, because the air quality is at “hazardous” and its recommended not to go outside unless essential. I have no essential reason to go outside, so I’ve been cooped up in my tiny dorm room all day.* I don’t even want to walk across campus to my office, where the air is probably better and there’s free coffe (a HUGE deal in China). I also had tentative plans to go out bike riding and maybe drinking with friends today, but I don’t think I’ll do that unless the air quality gets down to “very unhealthy.” If I had a mask it would be better, but good masks are hard to find, and they’re even harder to find ones that fit my face.
*luckily my dorm building has a cafeteria and a little convenience store.
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Oh! and half the good internet is censored. That’s another plus about my office…
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