Sick of the 9-to-5 life? Yearning for work that’s creatively fulfilling? If you’re someone who loves to write, the idea of becoming a freelance writer has probably crossed your mind.
And if you’ve ever wondered how to turn that fantasy into a reality, this post is for you.
I’ve been a freelance writer since 2013, and over the years I’ve fielded many questions from folks interested in freelancing.
Are you better this week than you were last week?
There’s only one way to guarantee an affirmative answer to that question: Set a self-improvement goal at the beginning of the week.
Why the beginning?
Long-term goals encourage procrastination rather than action.
In a study published in 2015, Daphna Oyserman of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center and Neil Lewis of the University of Michigan found that for goals to be motivating, the future (the deadline) must feel imminent.
A few years ago, author Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, became a New York Times Bestseller. Kondo, a Japanese consultant who helps people get organized, detailed her KonMari method of decluttering in her book. We wondered if her principles could be applied to writing and found that they work just as well for creating clean copy as they do for creating a clean habitat.
Whether it’s the latest tech industry innovations, what’s next in space travel, or the most obscure gadgets out there, there’s a lot happening in tech. How to keep up with the trends?
A lot of tech innovators and enthusiasts have launched YouTube channels to talk about tech news, provide product reviews and how-tos, and explore new experiments in tech that are just starting to make a splash.
When I was working full-time in media relations, exchanging emails with journalists all day every day, I learned one thing—out-of-office messages don’t have to be boring. Although most of the out-of-office replies I got were pretty standard, a few stood out by either making me laugh or providing me with interesting information. Here are some ways to make good use of your own out-of-office message.
Your out-of-office email message says, “I’m away from my desk right now, but I’ll get back to you at my earliest convenience.” Have you created a grievous business faux pas? Surely, you meant well. How could it possibly be impolite to say that you’ll do something just as soon as it’s convenient for you?
Language has power. Words and phrases are open to interpretation. They can convey a certain tone, depending on the context in which they’re used.
Text speak gets a bad rap.
It’s been pegged as barbaric, accused of ruining the English language, identified as a symbol of the millennial generation’s laziness, and perhaps worst of all, it’s been strung up as the next bad habit liable to rot kids’ brains.
That puts it in the same category as American English, according to Prince Charles, and rock ’n’ roll, according to conservative evangelical parents of the 1950s—two institutions that turned out pretty okay, according to the majority.
