Sustainability is a big fat buzzword. It gets trotted out anytime someone wants to appear to care for the environment and it’s meaning is becoming diluted.

We’ve added a sense that ‘sustainability’ has to mean we’re talking about the environment. But the word really has much broader roots than that. Sustainability is a question of building something that can repeat and continue, especially in a situation when limited resources are available. That can mean talking about energy efficiency and the like, but it can just as easily be a question of practicing stewardship with our own time or creativity. A business that requires you to put in hundred hour work weeks is just as unsustainable as the current worldwide levels of oil usage.

Getting the Talk About Sustainability Right

While I tend to be contrary when it comes to environmental issues (at the very least, I think our approach to recycling paper is dangerous), I do think it’s incredibly important to talk about sustainability as a part of entrepreneurship. Where I diverge from other people is the idea that the environment is the only resource we need to protect.

So, let’s get the environmental stuff out of the way first: it’s short-sighted to set up a business in such a way that you’re not going to have the resources you need down the road. Choosing ways to reduce the amount of energy your business needs, along with other natural resources, is simply good business. If nothing else, making a resource scarce makes it more expensive for your business to grow in the future. Assuming that you actually want a long-term business, rather than a quick buck, careful management of resources is a must.

The local ecosystem, by the way, falls into that category. I’ve never really understood companies that make choices that lead to contaminated water tables and similar problems: leaving ethics and morality entirely out of the matter, it always makes for one heck of a human resources problem. Sick employees are expensive employees and employees with low morale can do all sorts of harm to the bottom line. It really is cheaper to run a business with an eye to environmental impact in the first place. The only exception is if you plan to be out of business relatively quickly and want to make the absolute most money in the shortest amount of time — that’s still bad business, though, given that the earning potential of a well-run company can extend decades.

Less Obvious Sustainability

In addition to the warm, fuzzy, environmentally-friendly sustainability discussed above, we need to talk about the other resources that need some stewardship.

Human resources are a key component of more advanced sustainability concerns, both in terms of yourself as an entrepreneur and in terms of the people that you work with. As a business owner, I’ve witnessed first hand (and committed) some incredibly stupid moves involving allocating human resources. It’s very tempting, especially when you’re bootstrapping, to tell yourself that sleep is unnecessary for a couple of weeks at a stretch. We do stupid things in terms of our health — particularly concerning, given that many entrepreneurs don’t prioritize health insurance. I’d like to say that’s just the price of admission and that if the business is a good one, things will even out eventually.

But the truth is that it’s not that hard to burn an entrepreneur out. Even successful business owners will close shop and take jobs if they use up their own stamina. I’m not telling you that an entrepreneur should limit herself to a forty-hour work week or anything like that, but we do need to think about sustainability. We need to keep at least some time on the schedule for rest, to make sure we’re healthy and all of that. Depending on your speciality, creative burnout may be a concern, as well — you may need to budget in down time from creative work, at the very least.

We have to think about how hard we push people we work with, too. I keep reading horror stories about Silicon Valley startups that expect coders to sleep at their desks. Let’s be honest: who actually does decent work on a fifteen minute nap caught under a desk? Those companies will have to have that code rewritten at some point, driving up costs. Once again, I have no problem with hard schedules and expecting people to put in the hours, but if you’re working on a timeline that requires every person in the company to work twenty hours a day for the next couple of weeks, you’re simply not going to meet the deadline you’ve set with any kind of quality product.

Playing Buzzword Bingo with Sustainability

Right now, the word ‘sustainability’ is a hot buzzword. If I had another clear term to talk about similar issues that wouldn’t get me funny looks during conversations, I would use it. I don’t, though, and the underlying concept is crucial to business.

Even if the only consideration you give to sustainability is to sit down with your business plan and check that you have the necessary resources — including hours in the day — to succeed for the next year, you’re going to come out ahead. I hope that you go beyond that point: it’s worth considering not just what you need to run your business, but also how available those resources will be in the future. Even if you’re just thinking about how many hours you can really work, day in and day out, you’ll wind up with a business that is easier to sustain in the long term.

Image by XKCD creator Randall Munroe

There are a lot of descriptions of people who work for themselves. If you take on contracts for creative work, you can be a freelancer or an independent contractor. If you’re looking to build something bigger down the road, you might be an entrepreneur — or you might just be a small business owner. Nomenclature can be very important: because most of these titles have fairly common interpretations, people can tell a lot about you depending on which one you choose.

Freelancer: Freelancers are almost always individuals working on their own, usually in a creative field. A freelancer works on projects for clients, either for one client at a time or for multiple clients. In my experience, freelancing is one of the more common ways for people to strike out on their own. That’s at least partially due to the fact that many freelancers started out working on client projects while still also working for an employer.

Permalancer: Permalancers are a relatively new iteration of freelancers. Some companies (usually large — like MTV) rely on creative talent and hire freelancers, who are expected to put in forty hours of work a week indefinitely from the company’s office. On the surface, most of us would consider permalancers to be employees without benefits, but legally a permalancer is usually considered to be self-employed and can do things like write off business expenses as deductions, at least until the IRS decides to reclassify a company’s permalancers and demand payroll taxes.

Independent Contractor: The term ‘independent contractor’ is a broad one and can include freelancers, consultants and more. Usually an IC, as some companies abbreviate the term, is an individual providing a service, although I’ve seen companies refer to small businesses providing services as independent contractors as well. It’s a classification that’s often used to figure out who to send what forms to. If you are asked to submit a W-9 form from a business that has paid you money, you’re probably considered an independent contractor.

Consultant: The plural of ‘consultant’ seems to be ‘consulting firm’ these days. While a consultant may work on her own, she may also be part of a company (or the owner of that company). As far as job descriptions go, a consultant usually goes into someone else’s business and tells the owner how to do a specific thing. It’s less common for the consultant to actually do the work, though not unheard of — a consultant may have a team on tap to implement the course of action she suggests.

Virtual X: In certain fields, virtual workers are fairly common. Virtual assistants are particularly so. A VA may specialize in certain types of work (including creative work that freelancers also do) or handle general administrative tasks. There are also companies that organize groups of employees to act as virtual workers, mostly in countries like India or the Philippines. But there are also plenty of independent VAs. A VA’s client is usually a small business or an independent worker.

Independent Worker: You’ll commonly find ‘independent worker’ used as a catchall for any individual who doesn’t work for an employer and who also doesn’t have any employees of her own. It’s just that plain and simple.

Solopreneur: Just like the name says, a solopreneur works on her own. The big difference between a solopreneur and most of the titles above is that a solopreneur is often offering products rather than services. Because the title has especially caught on in certain online circles, those products are likely to be electronic, such as ebooks. But they can be anything that one person can bring to fruition without hiring employees.

Entrepreneur: Many of the definitions of entrepreneur revolve around a question of risk. An entrepreneur starts a new venture (or more than one), taking on the risk involved, with a goal of building something beyond just herself. She may start as a one-person operation, but most entrepreneurs have visions of bringing in employees and growing a big business.

Small Business Owner: Most small business owners go through a larval stage of entrepreneurship at some point. But this title conjures up an image of something stable. For most of us, it creates the idea of a small office or store with just a few people working. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, though, a small business is anything with less than 500 employees.

Startup Owner: Where a small business owner or an entrepreneur is usually in their business for the long haul, the most successful startups are built with an exit strategy in mind. Whether the startup owner (or owners) want to be bought, bring in a management team and have an IPO or something else entirely, I wouldn’t generally describe them as people who will still be doing the exact same work even five years from now.

The Evolution of Titles

Personally, my choices of how to describe what I do have been shifting. When I first started out on my own, I knew that I was a freelancer down to my bones. But I started freelancing about eight years ago. It’s natural that my own understanding of what I do has evolved. These days, I consider myself an entrepreneur more than anything else — though, within the right context, I will refer to myself as a consultant or a small business owner. That’s a bit of a personal problem: most people aren’t crazy enough to try to run what really amounts to three companies at once.

This sort of evolution is absolutely common. I’ve seen virtual assistants become consultants, freelancers become startup owners and so on. But I also know people who have stuck with one title for twenty years or more. Just like the fact that you have to decide for yourself which of these options works for you, you have to decide if your title is going to change down the road.

Image by Flickr user Vince Welter

If you take a look at the job titles back on your family tree beyond the last hundred years or so, you’re not going to see a lot of company men. You might see a few different job titles, like farmer, sailor, tailor or blacksmith. In the 1800s or so, you might see a few factory workers. But in any period before the Industrial Revolution, you’re probably looking at a family history full of people working for themselves or for marginally wealthier landowners in their area. There simply weren’t big companies the way there are today — there was no infrastructure for them.

But there may be too much infrastructure to make many of those big companies sustainable in the future. I strongly believe that we’re going to see independent workers as a majority portion of the workforce in the near future.

The Trend Towards Contractors

The big trend that will minimize the number of employees that many companies rely on is the move towards contractors: in order to cut costs, many companies have already significantly reduced their workforces, bringing in contractors as necessary to do certain work. The savings are significant. Even if a company pays a contractor a great hourly rate, the fact that there’s no need to pay for downtime, office space, health insurance and so on, means that there’s a significant savings.

Even when big businesses have more money to spend on labor, it’s doubtful that they will hire back the employees that they’ve laid off. A ‘jobless recovery’ is guaranteed.

But that also means a boom time for contractors, especially skilled individuals willing to invest time in finding the right gigs. Some jobs are difficult to hand off to independent contractors (especially those who never set foot in an office), but technology has transformed the majority of work done today.

The (In)Stability of Big Business

The forty-year man is turning out to be a fluke of the 20th century. The idea that a worker could devote his life to a company and expect to be taken care of in return has already been proven to not play out in the long-term — it functioned for less than a century.

In part, that’s because big companies have to be run primarily for profit. If there’s no possible way for the CEO to even meet every employee working at the company, how can we expect that he will make those employees anything resembling a priority? I’m not saying that C-level executives are hard on employees on purpose, but if you can’t picture the people you work with, you automatically dehumanize them. So the folks near the top make out pretty well, because they’re ‘real’ to their bosses and the folks down at the bottom don’t get the same opportunities. It’s going to be harder and harder to find smart people to take on jobs in the lower echelons of big business.

When you add in the fact that layoffs have become a way of life for many employees, going to the office each day doesn’t look particularly good.

Infrastructure Offers Options

Modern technology allows me to manage projects with contractors located around the world. There’s no need for me to hire a local employee and try to keep her busy for a set number of hours a day. When you consider that technology isn’t about to slow down, it evens seems unfair to offer to pay on an hourly basis — a good contractor or entrepreneur may be able to easily find ways to handle certain projects very quickly. Personally, I don’t care how work is done, as long as it meets my requirements as far as due date and quality. Hourly rates punish the best workers, in a way.

Our ancestors worked on individual projects because there just weren’t the tools to make it possible to collaborate well. The biggest organizations — like standing armies — relied on rigid hierarchies to communicate ideas.

As technology evolved, it was possible to grow larger organizations without having to structure them quite so rigidly. Good communication tools and improved processes made it possible for huge organizations to function without quite as thick of a management layer as an old-school army might require. Think about the bigger companies you’ve seen in action: it isn’t necessary to have a squad leader for every eight employees, plus the chain of command for platoons, companies and so forth. Depending on the type of work employees are handling, there may be one manager for anywhere from ten to one hundred employees.

Today, as long as you’ve got decent infrastructure in place (good project management software, communication tools and so on), one person can orchestrate a hundred contractors completing projects for a single company without many difficulties. That makes independent workers the obvious answer to most labor needs, especially as the infrastructure continues to improve.

There’s a certain mindset that you’re likely to encounter in the fast-paced worlds of internet marketing, start-ups and other specialized types of entrepreneurship that if you want to be in business, you absolutely have to ‘crush it.’

Gary Vaynerchuk is the mascot of this point of view and, boy howdy, has it worked for him. The man turned a single liquor store into a media empire.

But just because something works well for Vaynerchuk doesn’t mean that it’s definitely going to work for you. Not all of us have the same mindset, motivations or energy levels. Vanyerchuk does well at ‘crushing it’ because — and I say this with respect, awe and positivity — he has the energy of a toddler who’s been mainlining Pixie Sticks. Personally, I have to sleep occasionally.

Are the War Metaphors Not Cutting It For You?

Business doesn’t have to be a battle. Sure, you’re not going to get anywhere if you aren’t putting in the hours and the effort, but that doesn’t mean that you have to ‘destroy the competition,’ ‘shock and awe your target market’ and generally declare war to build a viable company. There are other options. The reason that we don’t hear too much about them is that those options are quieter and used by entrepreneurs who are, in turn, operating with a mindset that’s a little quieter.

But Kelly Kingman and Pace Smith — two entrepreneurs who I respect just as much as Gary Vaynerchuk — have set out to change the situation. Rather than offering business advice that requires you to stockpile your own set of Pixie Sticks, they’re talking about the Way of the Peaceful Entrepreneur.

Yesterday, Kelly wrote a huge post breaking down the differences between the peaceful approach to business and the more gung-ho alternative that we’ve heard so much about, and how they play into operating a business online. It’s a great read and I encourage you to go over the whole thing, but there is one section in particular that I want to point out:

When I started my business, I struggled to get my mind around how people were making money online — and it was even more difficult to explain to my friends and family. When you’re starting out, online business models can blur together because you’re drowning in advice. Too often, everything gets lumped into the category of “blogging,” simply because most websites also function as blogs. Blogging is one business model among many options that are open to you.

The drawback to blogging as a beginning business model is that it’s what I call a high traffic strategy — the amount of money you make is directly connected to how many people visit your site. For new entrepreneurs who can’t wait two years to make money, it’s far more effective to start with a service based-business, because it’s a low traffic strategy. You need far fewer individual clients than blog visitors in order to make a living.

Blogging for a living requires aggressive tactics. It’s one of the reasons that, when I started blogging, I didn’t actually try to make money from it. I used my blog as a showcase to land clients. I had a blog that worked for me, but I also had a business that didn’t kill me with 90 hour work weeks.

More Good Stuff to Come

On Monday, Pace is the main attraction in a ‘peaceful cage match’ with Johnny B. Truant to debate the merits of the opposing view points. Johnny is a firm proponent of aggressive entrepreneurship, so this is a match well worth tuning in for. Best of all, it’s free. Make sure to get in on the live call.

Of course, all of this is a build up to something bigger — a seven week ecourse on building your business as a peaceful entrepreneur. Personally, I think that Pace and Kelly are fantastic instructors. They also teamed up to create Engaging eCourses which I go back through about once every three months because it’s such a great resource. But even if you aren’t ready to commit seven weeks to The Way of the Peaceful Entrepreneur, make sure you don’t miss any of the free materials they’re offering.

(D)

It’s two days into 2012 and I’ve already heard many suggestions about what’s to come: The UN has named 2012 the year of sustainable energy. The Chinese lunar calendar lists 2012 as the year of the dragon. I’ve even read a physics article suggesting that 2012 may just be the year of cold fusion.

I’m not about to suggest that you plan your schedule around these grand pronouncements, but I do have one of my own. I firmly believe that 2012 is a year for entrepreneurs. The trends are certainly in our favor, at the very least.

Where We Are Now

The current economic situation, to put it bluntly, continues to suck. Phrases like ‘jobless recovery’ seem to be in every other article, making it feel like there’s no end in sight. It feels like there are no jobs out there, and more people are looking every day.

But business isn’t so bad for a lot of us. Freelancers, start ups and small businesses are making money right now. More people are realizing that there are still plenty of ways to make money, beyond finding one of those elusive nine-to-five jobs.

That fact shouldn’t be newsworthy, either: during the Great Depression, a lot of new businesses opened their doors. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, got its start with just a little bit more than $500 at the end of the Great Depression. So did Allstate Insurance, Converse and Revlon. Starting a new business during a depression doesn’t guarantee success, of course, but if you can start a business with an ingrained culture of doing everything as lean as you possibly can, you’ve got a head start for growing that same business in the future.

Less to Lose

There are a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs right now. Whether you’ve been freelancing, working for the man or are just getting out of school, think long and hard before hunting for a job. A lot of big companies aren’t hiring, after all, but many are working with contractors and freelancers. They still need help to make sure that they keep earning money. Since contractors can handle short-term projects, don’t need office space and are generally less expensive to work with, it’s a win for companies using contractors instead of employees.

It’s not such a bad deal for contractors, either. Rather than working on salary, a contractor who does things right can walk away with a high hourly rate and avoid unpaid overtime entirely. It’s also relatively easy for someone to start out as a freelancer and turn her work into a much larger business, with sub-contractors or even employees of her own.

Right now, entrepreneurship can be particularly appealing because it’s just not as risky ask when times are good. When you have no guarantee that an employer will be able to offer you health insurance or a steady paycheck, employment looks a lot less secure.

A lot of people are suggesting that big businesses will not be interested in going back to working with full-time employees even when hiring a larger staff is more financially feasible. But I think that a lot of former employees will also be uninterested in going back to nine-to-five gigs after building up a higher income and figuring out that they can cover benefits themselves.

Earning Money the Hard Way

Personally, starting up a new business always seems like the easy option to me. I’m aware that there are people out there who are just better equipped to work for an employer than I am and perhaps even enjoy it. That’s cool; it takes all kinds. But entrepreneurship does really seem like an easier option than some of the ways that people are scraping by right now.

I have friends who put together these patchwork livings, trading sorting out storage units for housing, picking up a little freelance work online, selling craft projects here and there, and taking odd office jobs and temp positions to keep the money rolling in. These aren’t people who wouldn’t normally be able to find jobs — it’s just that they’re living in places where even the position of cashier at the local fast food joint has no turnover. It’s the hardest sort of existence I can imagine. We really are talking about earning money the hard way.

Some of those patchwork pieces could very easily make for decent businesses. It’s an opportunity that at least a few are exploring. With the low cost of starting a new service-based business (ten dollars for a domain name and a few dollars a month for hosting), these people are a driving force behind the entrepreneurship trend.

Where We’re Going

Looking back, I’m pretty comfortable calling the 20th century the Century of Big Business. Big corporations flourished in a way that they never have before. But the 21st century will be the era of the individual and small business — the century of the entrepreneur.

We’ve already seen the start of this particular trend. Big companies that we rely on every day start in garages with two co-founders and a few hundred dollars. Some of the tools I use for running my business have millions of users and less than a dozen staff members.

2012 is just one more building block for this trend. I’m not expecting anything particularly momentous this year — I’m a lousy fortuneteller at the best of times — but the trend is there and it’s going to keep growing.

Image by Flickr user Sally Mahoney

This is a book that I’ve been trying to read, review and post about for what seems like forever. I received a review copy of Launch not too long after it came out earlier this summer. The author, Michael Stelzner, is the founder of Social Media Examiner — a site that never fails to have great information on social media, while avoiding the same stories that other sites repeat over and over.

I went into Launch with high expectations. And — despite the fact that I’m not Stelzner’s target market — I wasn’t disappointed.

Content as Fuel

First of all, I have to admit that I’m a sucker for space metaphors. I’m fascinated by rockets, moon landings and all the rest. It looks like I’m not the only one, based on Stelzner’s use of space metaphors to make ideas around content marketing understandable to small business owners.

Within that context, content (especially online) is nuclear fuel. It’s the stuff that propels a business into the stratosphere, probably before you can even get clearance for lift off from ground control. I say I’m not the target market for this book because I absolutely agree with Stelzner. Done right, content marketing can’t help but help a business grow. I’ve been working in this field for several years now and no one needs to persuade me of the value of content or show me how to use it.

But Launch does fill a need. It is full of not only persuasive material that showcases just how useful content can be for promoting a business, but also a lot of how-tos. Stelzner is known for producing fantastic white papers, publishing an annual Top 10 Blogs for Writers. He breaks down the value and the mechanics of both techniques as well as several others, showing business owners how to really make use of these techniques.

Who Should Read This Book

If you know that you need to be doing more marketing for your business, but you’re not exactly sure where to start, you should start with Launch. Depending on your industry and your own experience, there’s a fair chance that you’ll need additional help with all the marketing projects you come up with while reading the book — but you’ll have the basic knowledge that will let you choose the content marketing projects that are best for your business.

Officially, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work is geared towards bigger businesses. Its authors, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, focused their research on creative teams within much bigger organizations — the guys who do R and D work for a big corporation, for instance.

But while the teams studied didn’t have as much on their plates as any good entrepreneur is juggling, there are still a lot of relevant concepts in this book for someone with a significantly smaller team. We may not be in a position where we need to motivate employees right this instant, but we need to motivate ourselves and anyone else that winds up working with us (even if they aren’t employees). That’s even more true when we’re talking about creative ventures.

The Research Behind the Book

Amabile and Kramer are, first and foremost, researchers. They’ve both done some pretty intense study of business and creativity. The Progress Principle is no different. Before writing the book, they collected more than 12,000 diary entries from individuals who work on creative teams and they did an incredibly in-depth analysis of all of those entries.

The Short Version

There are certain things that seem like common sense when it comes to working with a team. Little things, like treating your team consistently and not changing up the schedule underneath them, make a team work better. But Amabile and Kramer’s research demonstrates that isn’t quite as common a perspective as we’d like. Within their case studies, they identify some fairly depressing examples, like companies that don’t even give employees the necessary resources to do their work or that change projects with no warning. These may be signs of a bad corporate culture to begin with, but it also highlights how easy it is to skip over facets of working with real live human beings that should be second nature.

The name of the book, The Progress Principle, comes from a noteworthy find in the duo’s research: when a team member feels like she’s making progress, she feels much better about her work. Day in and day out support are nice, an environment in which a team member feels valued is lovely — but the real motivation comes in to play when someone is able to see that she’s moving forward.

It’s worth your time and effort to cultivate an awareness of the progress being made on any given project, whether it’s your own progress or someone else’s. Sure, there’s plenty of other really useful information in this book, but that’s a great starting point.

A Final Note

I’ll be honest with you: this book is dense. If you ignore the introduction, the appendices and everything else that isn’t the meat of the book, you’re only reading 182 pages — yes, I counted. But there’s nothing extraneous in there. It’s the results of an exhaustive research project. If you’re the type to geek out on big data sets, there’s a really interesting breakdown of Amabile and Kramer’s data collection in the appendix.

It took me longer than usual to make it through this book. I can normally pound through a business book, but for The Progress Principle I had to slow way down, reading just a section at a time and thinking through what it means. I do recommend the book, but not as light reading.

I’m a writer, therefore I live on ramen noodles. I’m a writer, therefore I can’t afford health insurance. I’m a writer, therefore I’m poor.

I hate this line of reasoning more than you could ever guess. This line of thought is the biggest reason that there are poor writers out there, in a time when J.K. Rowling has made more than $1 billion on a series of children’s books. There are copy writers worth millions, columnists who do pretty damn well for themselves and plenty of writers who are making a respectable income for themselves. And yet, the mindset that writers are a bunch of starving artists hidden away in their garrets persists.

Here and Now, Let’s End It

Let’s be honest with ourselves. There’s a reason that writers perpetuate this mindset. It’s convenient. When everyone you know thinks that writing won’t bring in a single cent, making ten grand a year from it suddenly sounds almost respectable. Low expectations make anything look better.

But here’s the thing: despite my hatred of bid sites and content farms, if you sat down and worked an eight hour day at most of them, you’d at least beat minimum wage. That’s over $15,000 right there. And that’s one of the least lucrative ways to go about writing. It’s not hard to get to a higher level of income, by marketing yourself and reaching out to prospective clients. If you’re charging what you’re worth and making sure that you consistently have work, hitting forty or fifty grand a year is more than possible. If you charge $50 an hour for your time and line up 20 hours of client work a week (not even a full forty!), you can break $50,000.

If you’re willing to build a real business, reacher than just search out client work, the sky is truly the limit. So let’s stop thinking of ourselves as starving writers. Let’s think of ourselves as working in an incredibly lucrative industry and start reaching for those upper reaches.

Let’s Change Our Image, While We’re at It

I’ve had plenty of discussions at parties when someone first finds out what I do for a living. ‘A writer — you must work very hard to get enough work’ is not an uncommon comment. Something about how hard it is to find work right now is often a close second. As a matter of fact, I find writing to be relatively easy: in high school and college, I worked jobs like tutoring for standardized tests (quite difficult), renting apartments (also not too easy) and dressing up as a tomato to hand out flyers (not only a bit embarrassing, but I also got heat stroke). Writing is easy. I just have to plant my rear end in my chair. There’s no heavy lifting, annoying children to work with or extremely hot costumes.

On top of that, I am getting more work than I can handle right now — and so can you. There are new websites every day and they all need written content. Some of them are even looking for fiction. Now is a fantastic time to be a writer.

So let’s tell people that. Every time someone asks if you live on ramen noodles because you’re a writer, tell him that you’re doing pretty well. Make it true, as well: the best way to really rub it in is to make more money than whoever you’re talking to.

Image by Flickr user Raul Arrieta

It’s so incredibly easy to put off any part of what it takes to write a business: you don’t have to write your piece until the day before it is due, no one will ever know if you don’t market your business today and there’s never any rush to work on a project that you’re doing for yourself. This is a fact that I’ve struggled with throughout my writing career — and it’s something that most of the writers I know also have problems with.

Simply put, there’s not a lot of accountability in writing. As long as you get your clients’ projects done by the deadline, no one particularly cares how you spend your time. All deadlines are self-inflicted, meaning that ignoring them can be a simple matter. That means that we, as writers, have to create accountability, to keep our work moving along.

Creating Accountability: Tell Someone What You’re Up To

At the most basic level, telling someone what deadlines I have in mind makes it more important to me to meet that deadline, whether or not the person in question is involved in that deadline. That’s because I have a lot emotionally invested in being known as a person who always meets her deadlines. The same seems to hold true for many writers: just talking about your plans and expected deadlines can create accountability to help you accomplish them. Of course, if that sort of reputation isn’t important to you, you may have to go a step further. You may have to get someone a little more interested involved.

One of the reasons that writers who participate in some sort of writing group seem to have better chances of being successful is because they make a commitment to write regularly and have to show what they’ve written to other people. There’s nothing inherently group-oriented about writing, nothing that a good individual editor can’t do that a writing group can do. It’s the fact that members of writing groups feel the responsibility they have to show up to their group every week with new pages to share.

That doesn’t mean that you have to join a writing group to be successful — personally, the dynamics of most critique groups make me run for the hills — but having someone else involved in your project that will expect you to meet your own expectations can be key. One option may be a significant other or parent who a personal investment in making sure that you’re regularly bringing in income.

Keeping Accountability Reasonable

Carefully picking who you will be accountable to is important. I’ve had days when I don’t do much of anything, followed by days when I put in twelve hour days, because I’m trying to be accountable to myself. Personally, I know I can be a tough taskmaster for myself at certain times. That’s been another reason that being accountable to people outside of myself has been important — other people can be a little more reasonable about what you need to get done than those ambitious inner voices that most writers seem to have.

Image by Flickr user Peter

I like to think I’m a nice person. In my world, that means taking on some pro bono work, along with generally being available to chat with people who may not be able to afford to work with me but just need some pointers to get them started in the right direction. I don’t think that I do anything out of the ordinary as far as that sort of thing goes — which means the fact that I struggle with keeping the amount of time I spend on such work under control is probably pretty normal.

My biggest problem is that, while I want to help people, I also like eating. I can’t spend every hour of my working day on projects or conversations that won’t pay the bills. Bringing that volunteer workload in line with what I can reasonably afford to spend on projects that won’t pay is a constant struggle.

Choosing Who to Help

Who am I to say that the animal shelter that asked for me to help them set up a newsletter is more or less deserving than the beginning freelance writer who needs a couple of ideas on marketing so that she can feed her family? I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a sucky decision to have to make. Generally, I try to give priority for pro bono work to causes I personally care about. Personally, I care more about helping local organizations. From there, it’s a matter of first come, first serve.

I’ve put a couple of hours here and there in my work calendar that are meant to be used on pro bono work. When those are filled up, that’s the end of my availability. It’s hard, but I can’t afford to do things any other way.

Little Questions Add Up

I’d like to be able to claim that I personally respond to every email that lands in my inbox. Even if we take out the spam and newsletters that make up a healthy portion of my email, it’s still not a claim I can make. If an email comes in from someone I’ve never heard from before, who isn’t a prospective client or long-lost cousin, it goes at the bottom of my list to respond to. Most weeks, that means that I won’t respond to an email immediately but the odds are good that I’ll get to it after a couple of days — but when I get busy, it may be weeks before I can get to it. If that’s the case, I might get things together enough to send some sort of form response, or (and I hate to admit this) I don’t even touch it.

I’ve gotten worse about that sort of thing, but I’ve also found better ways to cope lately. I’ve got some form responses that my virtual assistant can send out. I’ve built time into my writing for this blog and other projects to take questions that I may not be able to answer any other way. I try hard, in part because I really do want to be a nice person.

San Jose Library