First, my days are actually nights. My husband works nights, and I usually keep the same schedule as him. Monday through Friday, I'm working nights - but some Monday's I'm up earlier than usual, so I can be found during the daylight hours. On the weekends, I'm up during the day more, but I seldom do any work for clients on the weekends UNLESS....
This brings me to another thing that few people know about me. I have Lupus (SLE). Sometimes, I wake up only to go right back to bed. I have to deal with Lupus flares, where my finger and wrist joints are swollen and painful. I have to deal with Lupus Fog, where I have extreme problems concentrating or staying focused. When I have flares, I feel absolutely drained and exhausted, on top of everything else going on with my body. It sucks - make no mistake about that - and it can, and often does, interfere with my work schedule. This will cause me to work on a weekend...if I need to make up for lost time during the week due to a Lupus issue.
Luckily, I've learned to watch for signs of a potential flare. I can still have a flare that catches me by surprise, but that happens less often now. What I cannot predict is how long a flare will last, or how severe it may be when it hits. I've learned not to have ten or fifteen open jobs through any of the freelance websites. I only bid on two at a time. If I already have a bid that I've won, I'll only have one open bid, and I resist the urge to bid on anymore work until that bid has been accepted or rejected. I have to be very careful not to overload myself. This way, when a flare hits, I can still meet my obligation to the client.
Bless my husband! I have had instances where I've had extremely bad flares, where typing wasn't possible to any extent. He does the two finger typing thing, but he has actually brought my laptop into the bedroom - where me and my fifty pillows have found comfort for a moment - and I talk while he types my articles. He turns the screen so that I can proofread, makes corrections and changes as I request them, practices a great deal of patience for me, and gets my work submitted by the deadline if and when I need him to do this. Without that extent of help, I wouldn't even attempt to still work with this condition.
My Lupus thing is why I really like iWriter so much. I don't have to bid on jobs, and if I have a flare, I simply don't work. That works out really great for me!
A typical day (or night) when I am not having a Lupus flare, however, actually is fairly 'typical.' I wake up, fix the coffee pot, and make my bed while waiting for the coffee to make. I drink a cup or two sitting at my kitchen table, or in my living room watching CNN in order to catch up on the news of the day. I make it a point to brush my hair and put on actual clothes. It's so easy to get out of that habit when you work from home, and even more so when your entire life takes place at night, so I make sure that I do this every single day (night).
Following this, I do whatever housework needs to be done, which usually isn't much, since it is just me, my husband, and our three cats that live here. The housework generally takes less than fifteen minutes, except for Saturdays. On Saturday, I do the laundry, sweep and mop the floors, scrub the bathrooms, change cat litter, empty garbage cans, change sheets, and things of that nature. Saturday housework usually takes about an hour or so, and that is also the day when my husband and I run our errands and buy groceries. When we get home from buying groceries, we cook for the week, so for the rest of the week, all we have to do is heat something up in the microwave, rinse our plate after eating, and stick it in the dishwasher, which I turn on right before I go to bed each morning. We are highly organized at my house. We have to be because I have a touch of OCD. If my house isn't clean and neat, I can't think about anything else.
Once my daily (nightly) housework is done, I move into my room where I have my laptop. My husband and I are both blessed to have our own rooms. We have a bedroom that we share, and then he has his room, where his computer, television, gaming systems, stereo, etc is all located, and I have my room where all of my craft stuff, sewing machine, laptop, stereo, television, etc is all located, and we respect each other's space. Of course the house also has a kitchen, living room, two bathrooms, a laundry room, and a den. The den doesn't have a stick of furniture in it, and we've never actually decided what to do with that room. Right now, the only thing in there is the treadmill, and a few empty boxes that the cats really enjoy playing hide and seek with.
Once I'm ready to move into my room, I get that third cup of coffee and take it with me. If I haven't already watched a little CNN, I fire up the laptop and see what the daily news is, check the weather for the day, look at my facebook page, check my email, and visit the freelancing websites that I use to see if there is anything urgent that needs my attention. I am organized enough to already have a list of the actual work that I need to do. That list is always made before I quit work the day before. After all of that is done, I make it a point to close out all of those websites, and I do not open them again until the work that I have planned for the day is done. This keeps me on track.
Because I have Lupus, and I have to be careful not to overtax myself, I am careful about the amount of work that I schedule for myself. On a good day, I can knock out anywhere from twenty to thirty articles, depending on the article topics and how much research is involved. For harder or longer articles, I plan fewer for the day. I do not allow anything to side track me from the work that I have planned. This is essential for me! However, if the articles I'm writing are easy, and really don't require an abundance of thought and concentration on my part, I will fire up my Big Brother Live Feeds, if it's summertime (like it is now). Yes, I'm a Big Brother Fanatic! I can listen to the feeds while I work. If Big Brother isn't currently in session, I turn the television on and listen to reruns of things like Law and Order while I work. If I find that the feeds or the television are distracting me from my work too much, I am disciplined enough to switch them off and return my full focus to work.
What if I have no jobs in progress? Well, that's rather rare. I almost always have at least one job in progress. But if I'm waiting on bids to be won, or if I'm waiting on a client for something, I will go to iWrite and knock out some articles there while I'm waiting. I start each day knowing how much money I want to earn for that day, and I know how much work I need to do in order to earn that money...and I make sure that it gets done.
Once I've done the work that I planned for the day, and I've earned the money that I want to earn for the day, I work on my blog, a squidoo lens, or something of that nature. Again, this requires typing, so it depends on how much work I've already done, and how I feel, but I try to limit this activity to an hour or two each day - and no more.
On a typical day, I spend about an hour waking up, drinking coffee, doing housework, and getting myself together in general. I then spend about four or five hours doing actual paying work. By that time, it's around 10pm, since I'm usually up by 4pm. Now, it's my time. I make it a point to plan my work for the next night, and then I decide what it is that I want to do. My husband doesn't get home until 6am. We go to bed about 8am, so I have lots of hours left to do the things that make me happy. I might read a book, watch a movie, fire up Netflix, work on a quilt or some other needlework project that I have in progress (depending on how my hands feel), or take a nap. When I get hungry, I heat up a plate of whatever we've cooked for the week, and just do what makes me happy in general, and that is a Typical Day in the Life of Shyley.
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