Is February–or March!–the New January? (And What We’re Doing to Make Sure You Rock It)
Is it just now your new year?
On a recent coaching call, someone explained to me that as they were slammed with deadlines both before and after the holiday, had many family commitments during the school break, and subsequently had to take a trip involving many time zones-worth of jet lag for a family health emergency, she only finally felt, at the end of January, that she was finally in a place to really start the new year.
As many take the December holidays to travel either to see family or take advantage of a spouse’s office closures to take a holiday somewhere that requires a long flight, it’s common for January 1 not to mark a fresh slate for your freelance writing career.
And as editors hit their desks on January 2, 3, and 4, you may have found yourself returning from your own holidays to abrupt, jarring transition from vacation mode to urgently-putting-out-lots-of-fires levels of stress.
Or you may not have had work slated or assigned for January, so your post-New Years return was a self-generated fire fight of pitching your heart out to fill your plate for the months ahead.
However your year began, I encourage you to take a moment this weekend or next to take a deep breath and reset.
It is all too easy to let a hustle in the beginning of the year continue unimpeded, so that spring, summer, fall, and the next holiday season arrive without you making conscious changes in how you approach your freelance writing to ensure each year your are hitting your goals, moving the dial on what success means to you, and moving closer to your dreams each year.
As promised, we’re going to be mixing up our long series on how to write different types of articles (I know a lot of you are really loving these, so don’t forget to catch last week’s webinar on front-of-book round-ups before it expires if you haven’t already) with some other topics, and due to popular demand, we’re slotting in a series on the admin side of travel writing this March, including:
- getting your travel writing finances in a row for tax season
- setting up reliable routines that make it impossible not to meet your travel writing goals
- storing your ideas up for successfully pitches when you need them
- finally getting “not having time” under control so you can do everything you set up to do in the same 168 hours Elon Musk has
(You can sign up for each webinar at the link above, and you’ve also got the option on the thank you page to subscribe for all of our upcoming webinars if you just know you’ll need them all, but don’t forget, you can also get an all-access pass to every webinar we’ve ever done through the Dream Buffet!)
So, if you’ve been starting to feel like 1/12 of the year is already gone and your shot of making this year different than the last has vanished right along with it, take the back half of February to catch up on your to do list and create some headspace, because we’re going to help you start fresh in March.
If you can’t wait until March to get you freelance writing butt in gear with a burst of new tactics and techniques to get you more excited and working smarter, our At-Home IdeaFest program is now available to start whenever suits you and work through at your own pace.