As a self-employed woman, one of the things I have to do is prioritize and also find balance. I have been feeling decidedly off-balance lately, so I have decided to re-focus my energies. And one of the ways in which I am going to do this is by moving even more behind-the-scenes here at Work It, Mom! Therefore, I am letting go of this poor, neglected blog. By doing so, I will be able to concentrate my energies on other activities for WIM, and also create some blogging space (hopefully) for others.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you behind the scenes!

Jen

The email goes like this:

Dear Jen,

After four months of waiting for you to return my manuscript to me, I can only conclude that you are not planning to get back to me on this. Before I contacted you, my colleagues assured me that you were wonderful to work with. They told me about the wonderful rapport you establish with your clients, and I found that to be true. However, I have come to learn that you are good only at establishing the initial rapport to rope your clients in. After that, you are all talk and no action. I am retracting my project from you. Not only that, but my two colleagues who recommended you are also withdrawing their business from you.

Sincerely,

Pissed off client

Hours after I woke up, I could still see that email in my mind’s eye. It preyed on all of my own insecurities, which is unsurprising because my mind drafted it. I think it was also unbelievably cruel of my own mind to do that to me. I lay in bed wracking my mind for who that email could have been from. It was both a relief and a slap to find out that it was from me.

The night before that, I dreamt that I was responsible for disposing of these dead mice that were the size of cats because they had swallowed other mice whole. I can’t remember who told me to dispose of them, but I know that I didn’t think much of that person, because my solution was to put the mice down the garbage disposal and turn it on. The disposal hurled mouse blood at me, and it hit me in the face and got on my teeth. I turned off the disposal and left the mice half in and half out of the drain, and ran to look in the bathroom mirror, frantic about having mouse blood on my teeth, but unable to stop my tongue from running over it and tasting it.

When I woke up, I was half tempted to go look in the sink and see if the mice were still there.

The grant I am working on is due on Saturday at 5 p.m. They need ten hard copies of the grant, so I would like to have it done by Thursday night, so Friday the client can print it, copy it, and bind it nicely. Yesterday, after school, I had to buy shoes for two kids, jeans for two other kids, groceries, we had dinner with friends, homework, bed time, and 37 urgent emails, all of which cut into the grant-writing time.

Today, my husband called me because he left a book at home, so I walked it over to the college classroom where he was teaching. I was on my way home with two hours left before time to pick up the kids, when I ran into my neighbor. “I am on my way home,” he told me, “because the kids have an early out today.”

Perfect.

This post is indicative of that fact that a) everything is conspiring against my finishing my grant deadline this week and b) apparently, I will do anything to avoid working on it.

Do you ever have anxiety dreams like these? I think I liked mine better when they involved forgetting my chemistry class for an entire semester…

After I set up the Most Excellent Work It, Mom! book club, the discussion took off so much that it felt… superfluous to start a weekly post here called What Are You Reading? What do you think? Not only did the post I had planned seem superfluous, but I have also been working on things behind the scenes here at Work It, Mom!, and in my other working life (I have two, don’t you?), I have two grant applications due at the end of this week. And today is my son Christian’s eleventh birthday. So, I have been flying around trying to configure budgets, do research for background sections, write measurable goals, buy birthday presents and cupcakes, cut up fruit for fruit salad, vacuum, get the kids to make their beds, coordinate writers for WIM articles, and keep up with the forums.

You know, my arms are tired. So, I don’t feel like I am doing a great job of juggling everything right now. But tomorrow is another day.
So, here is what I was thinking about instead. I would really love to keep the discussion about books alive, but it’s sort of boring just to have one hand clapping, don’t you think? So, I thought of this: Having one of YOU do a guest post each week (I am so totally not stealing that idea from Nataly– I gave it to her) about what you are reading, and showcase your thoughts a little more than we can with the forums. You can do a book review, talk about a favorite author, a genre, a magazine, etc. Whatever you want. And you can link to your blog, and you can point your readers to your post here. I’ll even give you a button to put on your blog that says, “I blogged at Work It, Mom!” or something more exciting that reflects the topic. What do you think? Would you be interested in doing that?

If you are interested, please leave a comment here and then I will coordinate with you about how to do this!

I am not going to work tonight. Right after I finish this post. But wait– I just had an idea today for how I can incorporate a blog onto my corporate site! I should really jot down a few ideas. And then? I am going to stop working. But if I just spent one hour tonight on reading these articles sitting on my desk? I wouldn’t have to do it tomorrow morning. And that would leave me more time tomorrow morning to read Carol’s chapter as a favor to her, before I start working on editing those two sections I have to turn around by the end of the business day.

And then I will really stop working tonight. It’s only 10:00 p.m. now– if I stop in an hour, that will give me some me time, right? Before I collapse on my bed?

Does this sound familiar? I am terrible about setting up boundaries for work. But I am working to get better. I now have a task list set up for Work It, Mom! responsibilities, so when I sit down every day to do my work here, I know exactly what I will do and in what order. I also have a timeline for a grant project I am working on for my editing company, with specific dates about when things should be done.

My problems are usually that there are all kinds of little projects that seem to have no end. (I wonder if anybody has submitted a new article to Work It, Mom! that I should edit and set live? I noticed a typo in an article earlier when I was reading and went in and fixed it. Maybe there are other typos in other articles?)

But if I [continue to] work tonight, chances are that instead of being more productive tomorrow, I will be less. I may, in fact, be a greasy spot on the rug. The third book by Stephenie Meyer came out yesterday.
It has been sitting and staring at me all day. I am going to go read it. Right now.

What are YOU going to do instead of work tonight?

What do you do when your own resume reveals something about you that could make a potential client not want to work with you?

When I began my medical editing business, I had on my resume, against my husband’s advice, an article I had published in Salon several years ago. He advised me to take it off because the article was about the fact that I smoked, and I was trying to get clients who were physicians, and who were most decidedly anti-smoking. I scoffed: “I’ll be sure to tell them I put the cigarette down long enough to make their edits.” I didn’t even smoke very much, and that is part of what my article was about. But still.

I was in conversations with a client who headed up a tobacco prevention program, though I did not fully understand this at the time he requested my resume. He looked at it and then emailed me back asking me whether I still smoked, because he had never hired someone who smoked before. I sat before the computer in shock. I was stunned. I could not believe my own hubris, my own stupidity. I thought the publication in Salon would outweigh the content. And here I was, about to lose a gig because of it. What to do? I suppose I could have written back that I didn’t smoke anymore. How would he have known? But deep inside, I knew that he would know. It was bad enough to have the habit. I wasn’t going to lie on top of it. At heart, I am a geeky, honest person.

I wrote back briefly that I did still smoke, still in the same small quantities as I had written about in the article, and that I hoped this wouldn’t be a barrier to our working together. As I hit send, my heart sank because I really wanted the chance to work with this client, and I was quite sure that I had blown it before I began. He wrote back that he suspected my attachment to smoking was more emotional than physical, and thanked me for my honesty. I got the gig. What was most important to him was that I respected him enough to tell him the truth. And that day I learned that a lot of people can edit, and there are probably many people who can do my job. But perhaps my ability to do my work had a bit more to do with who I actually was in addition to my abilities than I had previously ever suspected.

The title of this post is from a great book by Richard Russo, called Straight Man. The lead character thinks the line to himself right before he rises from a sticky, beer-covered table in a bar, and, despite being a well-respected professor in his community, despite knowing that this cannot possibly be in his best interest, hurls himself into a bar fight.

I cannot be the only one who does things that are not good for me. I just read over at LifeHacker that I could lose $1 million over the course of my lifetime by watching television instead of using that time starting my own small business from home. So, does that mean that in my case, I should start another small business from home?

What happens when, in my case, I could actually lose money week by NOT watching television? I currently write three TV show reviews per week, and get paid to do it, for a blog. And I have started to wonder whether this falls under the category of “Not good for me.” I spend an hour watching each show, so that’s three hours total, and then nearly another hour per show writing my reviews, finding images I am allowed to use in my posts, resizing the images, figuring out which number the episode is and what season in the show it is, and then creating a poll for the end of my post. So, that is about six hours a week for about less than minimum wage per hour.

And then the commenters are often nasty.

Why do I keep doing this? So I can justify having HBO for the summer? Because it’s something that I hope I can use as a portfolio sometime later? Because I like getting advance screenings of shows in the mail? Because I want the free T-shirt for the site? Does this make me feel cool? I suppose it is a combination of all of the above. It certainly isn’t because of the money. And there is usually nothing wrong with that.

But I can’t help wondering whether I would be a) making more money by working on my medical editing projects when those shows are on instead of watching them; b) making more money by working on tasks that I can do while watching TV, instead of having to watch the shows carefully for reviewing purposes; or c) more relaxed if I could just watch the shows– or just Tivo them and not have to watch them when they air and then write reviews right after. This is starting to feel like a whole lot of effort for not much gain.

What are YOU doing that isn’t good for YOU?

Author’s note: Today my husband sent me a link to an article from Salon called “Let us now praise editors,” which supports many of the points I made here! Check it out!

Reading Sheryl’s blog often has me reaching for my pen these days to jot down responses. I actually have another response to another one of her posts drafted, but this one is more immediate, so I’m doing this one first. In a post she did last week, she wrote about having to make revisions to designs that her clients have commissioned from her. (She is a graphic designer). She wrote about how sometimes the revisions the clients want are not necessarily the artistic choices that she would make– but she is in business to make the client happy, so off she goes and makes the revisions. And then, there is always the situation everybody loves: You do something exactly to client specifications, and then they hate it, and then they blame you.

I have a slightly different situation, as an editor. Editing someone’s work is actually a very personal, intimate act. Even if it is an article for a medical journal. I am still editing someone’s words, something someone thought. Last fall, I recruited a team of women to work with me, and the most common question I got was: How much editing can we do? They were worried about sparing the clients’ feelings. I ordered them not to worry about the clients’ feelings and to do the editing that needed to be done.

As it would happen, it was at this time that for the first time, I had a client who received quite a shock at the document we returned to him. He had thought the document was nearly ready for submission, and he got back, instead, a manuscript that was barely recognizable as his own. He emailed me and asked if we could set up a time to chat the next day so I could explain to him some of my thought processes. I wrote back immediately and said that he was the author and that if he did not agree with the changes, we could change things. And that is absolutely the truth. But what I didn’t tell him was that if he tried to reject any of my changes, I would argue with him.

We spoke the next day. He explained that he hadn’t been angry with me. He had been embarrassed at sending a document that he had thought was in better shape, and he wanted to understand how to give me a better document the next time. We spoke for over an hour, going over the manuscript paragraph by paragraph. And I explained to him that I knew it was harsh to see a manuscript with so many changes, especially with the track changes feature on. However, I told him, I would rather have a reputation for being tough and for getting him published than for him to tell people, “Gosh, she was really nice and spared my feelings in the editorial process. We haven’t gotten anything published yet, but she was really nice.”

The client ego is a fact of life. And I have found that not only do I have to be aware of it, but it is also providential that I work remotely, so people don’t have to look me in the eye the day after I edit their stuff– and vice versa. I wonder if I could do my job so effectively if I knew I would run into people on the way to the bathroom.

Another time, I was visiting a client site after I had made some edits to a manuscript. As I was setting up my laptop, an author said to me, “Those edits were rather harsh, Creer.” I started blushing and hemming and hawing, but she lifted a hand to stop me. “And you were absolutely right,” she told me. “Thank you.”

Sometimes you have to bend to what the client wants you to do. Or, in my case, you have to do what is in the client’s best interest even though it might not make you very popular. I think the key is understanding, which only comes with experience, when to do what.

If you are like me, you don’t often even think about your resume (let alone update it) before you need to think about the next position. This leads to stress. You should try to make it a goal to update your resume at least once a year, maybe more. When I was a university instructor, a colleague told me to keep a folder with any relevant emails or just a quick note to myself about my significant accomplishments. That advice has served me well.

I also keep a draft of my resume readily available on my computer, and whenever I find out that a grant has been funded or that a manuscript has been accepted, I go in and quickly just leave a note on my resume, save, and then get out of the document again. I can formalize it later– but I need to remember that I have something to update. Also, sometimes my clients don’t let me know when a manuscript has been published, so every few months, I search the online databases for publications and note when manuscripts that I have edited have been published. Those citations are important for my professional reputation, so I try to be very proactive about following-up about them. Not only do I need to update my resume for new and potential clients, but I also need to update my website (which I haven’t done for almost a year, my bad!).

It’s hard to keep on top of updating your information, especially if you are not actively looking for a new position. However, I firmly believe that you never know when you are going to need an updated resume handy, so it’s important to set aside time at least once a year to dust it off.

Today, I went around the blogosphere, hunting for more resume tips for you. I found some great stuff out there.

Minnesota Public Relations Jobs Blog has some concise, short resume tips, primarily about what content you should include and in what order.

Rebecca at the Career Niche makes the excellent point that employers are looking for soft skills as well as concrete experience. So, what are your soft skills? She refers us to a blog post called How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with. Some of the soft skills employers want are drive, curiosity, and ethics. These are tricky to convey, and the sort answer is that you need to convey them in your cover letter and in your interview. Though, I have begun including a short skills paragraph at the top of my resume, based on some advice I got from a head-hunter earlier this year. The short skills section is an abstract for your resume– it summarizes you even more succinctly than the rest of your short resume does.

Calming the Chaos, a blog written by one of our readers, addresses the Mommy gap on your resume, which is a big concern for a lot of us. My gap was not nearly as nice as her one-year gap, though. Mine was eight or nine years long. So, I have had to be pretty honest about why it is there, which means disclosing the fact that I have three kids. Fortunately, I work in an industry that is pretty family friendly.

My favorite find of the day, though, is The Job Lounge. Susan Ireland is a professional resume preparer, and she has a ton of great posts, including eleven on just how to address gaps on your resume. I highly recommend spending some time at her site.

What resume tips have worked best for you?

I have been traveling a lot, as I noted in an earlier post this week. Despite this travel, which was ostensibly a “vacation,” I managed to complete one of the most challenging projects of my career to date. I still have a little work to do this weekend on a tangential project, but last night I was able to send it off to the client with a feeling of accomplishment. The relief has not yet kicked in.

So, how do you get work done when you are traveling? I do it all the time. Here are some tips:

1) Make sure your laptop has a well-charged battery. This means remembering to plug it in overnight in the hotel just so the battery has a full charge in the morning, and also to make sure that your battery is in good enough condition to warrant use without a plug. Test this before you go.

1.5) Never, never NEVER put a water bottle in your laptop bag if you are going to have both with you on an airplane. Even if you don’t open the water bottle. Your water bottle will explode all over your laptop. IF that happens, do NOT turn your laptop on or plug it in to see if it’s dead: the electrical current passing through the water will fry it. If your laptop gets wet, open it and do everything you can to drain the water, turn it upside down for at least 24 hours, and go chew your nails to a stump somewhere else. Away from your laptop.

2) Don’t think you need to be in a wi-fi location to work. In fact, I got some of my best work done this week because I was working in places that had no internet connection: The library at Notre Dame University, a chartered bus to Chicago, a commuter train from Chicago.

3) If you plan to be away from your computer during the day, and therefore away from your work, get up early. I got significant work done on my project this week by getting up and working for three hours before we had anything planned. That way, I was able to appease my conscience that was screaming for me to work constantly, and also my husband, who wanted to enjoy Chicago.

4) Don’t accept new work right before you go. I was working on a deadline that couldn’t be budged. Even though I had been working on it daily for the two weeks leading up to my travel, I still was not finished. I had no other choice than to bring the work– or cancel my trip. But I certainly wouldn’t have taken on a new project right before I left, or accepted one while I was on my trip.

5) Enjoy your breaks. Even with a deadline looming, I was able to fully enjoy my time away from my computer. I ate samosas at the Taste of Chicago, went to the gift shop at the Art Institute, and walked until I had blisters. As a result, when I sat down to work, I was completely focused. I didn’t waste time, I didn’t surf the net aimlessly, and I didn’t sneak time in on blogs for pleasure. I worked. And because I was in a new environment, I didn’t need the other distractions the web usually provides for me. The change in location was exciting and fun and relaxed me, so I was actually able to work very efficiently.

Nobody likes to take work on their vacation. Nobody. But I am self-employed, and the projects I work on have deadlines that are out of my and my clients’ control. I have to get them done. So, I try to make the best of it and take the constant juggle with me.

Surely, I am not the only one. Do you have any traveling work stories?

That title is supposed to be funny. Because it is a joke.
Consultants and the self-employed don’t get vacations. And yet, here I am! On Not-A-Vacation!

All this week, I am going to be blogging (and working!) from various locations. In fact, that is one of the primary reasons I am so late with my post today. Yesterday, my husband and I kissed the children goodbye as they went off for a week with their father (yes, I am divorced and re-married), packed the car, and drove eight hours to South Bend, Indiana. We live in Northern Missouri, and my husband, a religion professor, is in the middle of a six-week seminar at Notre Dame.

Today, we have been in South Bend at his rental house, which is a little bizarre. Last night, I looked through the CDs on the headboard of his bed and felt like I was hooking up with some guy and looking through the stuff in his room for the first time. Tomorrow through Thursday, we will be in Chicago (seminars take field trips! Who knew?), then back to South Bend, and then I will drive home Friday afternoon. It’s complicated.

In the midst of all of this travel, I also have deadlines. In my life as a medical editor, I have a major deadline this week. It is a project that I have been working on every single day for the past three weeks. It is, in a word, Challenging. So, for the past three weeks, especially since my husband has been out of town and I have been flying solo not only as the boss and employee of my company but also as a single mother, I have been a little stressed out.

Last week, I went to the doctor for my yearly physical exam, and my blood pressure was high for me. I should clarify that usually my blood pressure is so low that it’s questionable whether I am even alive. But I pride myself on this. I depend on this. So, to have my blood pressure suddenly quite higher than normal was very alarming. I came home and could swear that I could feel my blood pulsing through my body. I could swear that I could feel my heart beating. This sensation persisted for… well, that was Thursday and this is Monday, and I am just now starting to calm down a little bit. A change of scenery, even with deadlines looming, has done me a world of good. I don’t have any stressors associated with this house, these rooms, these walls. So, I have been able to work and also spend a little time visiting Touch Down Jesus at Notre Dame University.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to take a normal vacation sometime. I am wondering whether that has happened since I embarked on self-employment two years ago. Nothing comes to mind. It is part of the trade off. But it could be worse: If I weren’t a consultant and I had a deadline like this, I would be sitting in a cubicle and working through my holiday without overtime pay, and my husband would be two states away without me.

What are your vacations like? Do you actually get to have them?