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tranfree issue 18 - 5th September 2000
Like Sands Through The Hourglass....So Are the Minutes of a Translator's Time:
By Mary Maloof Part I: Your Schedule - The Most Important Weapon In Your Time Management ArsenalWe've got to admit, it's great to be a freelance translator. It's impossible to find a "down side" to...
But the biggest "plus" - all that unstructured time - is definitely a double-edged sword. We can take off the afternoon to enjoy lunch with a close friend, run to the bank, or go to the doctor's office as often as we need to without constantly checking our watches to see if we're running late. We can sleep late (or even lie in bed all day long) if we're tired or sick, without having to worry about cutting into one more day of our precious "sick leave." We can close up shop early to take the dog to the park if we don't feel like working any more that day. But on the other end of the spectrum, we often stay at our computers doing "one more thing" until - whoa, it's midnight! How the heck did it get to be so late? We can forget to eat our meals because we don't have breaks scheduled in, and we can forget to take vacations and end up running ourselves into the ground because we don't have the customary several weeks of built-in holiday/vacation leave. It's a gigantic challenge to structure our time so that we squeeze the most out of it without miring ourselves in meaningless tasks that realize no profits, professional development, or personal satisfaction, or that don't benefit you and your business in some direct and concrete way. The most helpful thing you can do for yourself and your translation business is to impose some sort of structure on all that unstructured time - preferably one that is similar to what you would encounter in an in-house, corporate position. Hash out a schedule, establishing a definite time to start the work day, blocking out a definite lunch hour or half-hour, and setting a definite time to close up shop for the day. A sample schedule might be...
Of course, your schedule is not engraved in stone. To hold yourself to a rigid schedule would negate one of the greatest benefits of freelancing... ...being able to do what you need to when you really need to, without having to go by someone else's clock. Run errands if you have to, take one more half-hour answering e-mail if you want to, leave the office one hour later if you must, but try to stick to the schedule as much as you can. It's meant to be a structural aid to increase your efficiency and productivity while helping you conserve your energies - it isn't meant to be a prison. The component of your schedule that should be the closest to being ironclad is the time you leave your office every evening. Notice how I put a specific time to leave the office, with "NO EXCEPTIONS" in caps next to it. Since I'm a "one-woman" band with no assistants, that is all the more reason for me NOT to stay in the office till all hours of the night, but to jealously guard and conserve my energies and take care of myself. If I am sick, burned out, or exhausted for whatever reason, nobody else will be there to take up the slack for my business, and that's it! Therefore, I do everything in my power to prevent myself from getting sick, burned out, and exhausted - and a big part of the prevention work is creating clear boundaries of "office time" and "me time" for both my clients and myself so that I don't collapse from exhaustion or create opportunities for clients, potential clients, and colleagues to disrespect my time. After 6 p.m. and on weekends, my time is "me time" - no exceptions - and I don't hesitate to make that crystal clear to everyone I know and work with. A translator acquaintance of mine made the mistake of making herself available for on-call rush translations 24 hours a day. In the beginning, she thought this was a great idea because it would bring in a lot of money from rush charges, but all it led to was a tremendous headache. Often, difficult, unreasonable people would awaken her with telephone calls at 2, 3, 5 in the morning demanding that she do weird translations in fields she didn't specialize in. Since it was so early in the morning, she couldn't call her fellow translators to refer the work to them, and had to take a deep breath and tell these very impatient potential clients... "I'm sorry, but..."! And when the work was actually in a field that was one of her specialties, the clients were so difficult to work with, expecting her to perform miracles, or the work was such a pain in the butt that the extra pay wasn't even worth it. Her final observation on the fiasco was this: "You have to train puppies not to... I myself leave my office at 6 p.m. every evening, no exceptions - even if I am involved in a rush project. (If I'm working on a rush project, I simply dedicate the entire workDAY to it, and shift everything else to the back burner till it gets done; I allow my answering machine to screen all my calls and do not take any phone calls or answer e-mails.) Whenever I take on a new client, I emphasize that I always leave my office at 6 p.m., and never work on weekends or evenings unless I'm paid double. None of my clients have ever had a problem with this, and have always respected the boundaries I've set for them and for myself. Most of them have set workdays too, after all. And I dare say that many of them would tell you that they won't go to someone else who works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because they know they'd be taking their work to extremely tired translators who make horrid mistakes due to lack of sleep, or to wannabe translators who are in it only for the money and make horrid mistakes because volume and easy money is all they care about. I am aware that some of you may be thinking, "All this is easy for you to say, but when you need money, you must make yourself available." That is indeed true to a certain extent, but you have to remember to take care of yourself as well. If you play fast and loose with your resources and physical endurance without trying to conserve your energies, you could end up collapsing, and if that day comes, you won't be able to work and earn money anyway. When you set boundaries, live by them, and enforce them from the start; believe me, other people will respect them just as you do. Good clients won't blink at paying you more when they need you to work outside those boundaries. And the "bum" ones, who will quite readily go elsewhere, are not people you would want to work with anyway. Part 2 next issue Mary C. Maloof is a certified Spanish > English translator who
resides in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. She is the founder
and moderator of "SpTranslators," an Internet mailing list for
Spanish translators, founder and moderator of "Legaltranslators,"
an Internet mailing list for legal translators, director of The
American Web for International Languages, a worldwide job
referrals network for translators and interpreters, and owner of
Maloof Language Services, Inc., which offers a wide range of
translation and interpretation services. For more information
about her work, please contact her at
mmaloof@sprintmail.com |
Stick to it for
at least one week to get a feel for how much time you really
need for each specific type of task. Then, revise it as needed,
and stick to the revised version.
...bark. If you don't, they'll bark at you
incessantly when they grow to become dogs." When she changed her
policy, set boundaries, and learned to "train" her clients, lo
and behold, they stopped "barking" at her.