Musings from an overworked translator

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking… February 8, 2011

As Leo Babauta said in Minimalist Time Management: Keep Your Day Open (Freelanceswitch.com): “There are the super-organized among us — those who schedule every minute and stick to the plan to the letter — and then there’s the rest of us. We schedule a lot of plans, but our days don’t usually resemble the plan very much.”

I don’t know about you, but I am usually pretty organized. I keep a calendar updated on Google Calendar that syncs to my HTC G2 phone (which by the way I LOVE!). It helps me keep track of my social activities and appointments, which I can schedule while actually in the dentist’s office or business location. That said, I don’t schedule every minute of every day. I prefer to be a bit more spontaneous. I know what my goals are for that day, usually based on what deadlines I have looming over me.

I just survived a two-week dry spell of work. I had a small job here or there, but nothing really juicy to keep me at the computer. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I couldn’t believe how unmotivated I became. E-mails were postponed, blog posts remained unwritten, housework fell by the wayside. I did a lot of reading and caught up with numerous television shows. And I got the stomach flu just as work started coming back in (figures, right?)…

I eased back into work with a proofreading job and now have a couple translation jobs on my desk. I knew the dry spell wouldn’t last. It never does. I have learned to embrace the slow spells, and I have a financial cushion so I don’t lose sleep wondering how to pay bills with no money coming in.

Coming out of the stomach flu also gave me the energy to clean the apartment and clear my mind. I am not proud of my laziness. I knew it was well-deserved, but I decided to try implementing a time management system. After a brief search I think I might have found what I need.

Mr. Babauta’s rules for Minimalist Time Management are:

1. Don’t schedule appointments

I have realized that an appointment in the middle of the day can really eat up most of the day. My massage at 1 today bled into grocery shopping for an hour (after being sick for the last 4 days my refrigerator was BARE). I got home at 3:30 and hadn’t translated more than a couple hundred words. Luckily I am at my best in the evening…

My father prefers to schedule his appointments in the morning, leaving the rest of the day free. I won’t go so far as stop scheduling appointments, but I will try to be a bit more judicious and not fill up my week with one appointment every day. I will try to schedule most appointments that are near each other for the same day and just take the afternoon or whole day off.

2. Know what you want to accomplish today

Mr. Babauta suggests focusing on three things that you want to accomplish that day. For me that was translate about 2000-2500 words, get a massage and grocery shop. Mission accomplished.

3. Focus on one thing at a time.

Since I am such a multi-tasker this will be a hard one. The multi-tasker in me would have filed this blog post as a draft and gone back to translating, but I know it will be better to just publish it and then go back to focusing on translating the survey. Mr. Babauta claims “… single-tasking is not only more productive, it’s more relaxing as well.” I’ll let you know how that works…

4. Note tasks as they come up, to consider for later.

He suggests noting tasks that come up on a sheet of paper or a small notebook and then get back to the task you were working on. Sounds pretty simple. I will start trying this tomorrow.

Hey, it can’t be worse than what I’ve been doing, right? I have also occasionally adhered to the Flylady system, which can be a pretty good one. She recommends setting a timer for 15-20 minutes at a time as well as cleaning your house through small daily tasks (if any of you are living in chaos you might want to check her out…). If any of you have a time management system you would like to share, please share it in the comments.

Are you a whiner or a winner? January 19, 2011

WordCount had a great post back in December entitled As a freelancer, are you a whiner or a winner? that has me frequently reflecting back on it in my dealings with clients or while reading translation listservs. She offers a very good example of a winning football team in Oregon and how they won the championship through hard work, grit and determination. She then equated the story with being a freelancer, and it really hit home because it is true in our profession as well.

Too often I hang out with writers – in person or virtually, on writer message boards and forums – who spend a lot of time complaining about how hard they have it. This editor isn’t returning their emails. That one took months to get a story back. This assignment only pays 50 cents a word. The industry is changing,  the markets they used to work for aren’t there anymore and there’s nothing to replace them.

To which I say: suck it up.

Nobody forced you into this profession, and nobody’s making you stay.

Times are tough, but complaining isn’t the answer.

The answer is hard work, commitment, creativity – and attitude.

This is very true in our industry as well. It seems as if people are constantly complaining about “The Recession” or thinking that the sky is falling (or prices – same difference). It is this self-perpetuating negativity that keeps bringing a lot of people down. They spend their time thinking negative thoughts and thinking this behavior is normal. Since reading this article I realized I could either listen to the whiners or ignore all the negative talk and keep plugging away and being successful.

I support myself translating full-time, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am having a slow week at the moment, but I am relishing having a little time off to recuperate. Back in December when this post came out I had five translation jobs on my desk, and I had just turned down a proofreading job due to the next-day deadline. I have enough work to keep me busy most every day, and I have worked very, very hard to get here.

As an undergraduate I had an Advanced Composition teacher who belittled my German skills, and I had to work hard for the Bs and Cs I earned when I was used to getting As and Bs in everything else. I studied abroad the next year to improve my language skills and graduated from college cum laude with a double major in German and Russian. In grad school I had a teacher accuse me of cheating on an interpreting assignment when that wasn’t the case. I graduated anyway, and he later apologized to me. I also constantly felt that my German wasn’t as good as the other students, so I moved to Germany after I graduated to improve my language skills. After those six years in Germany I have an excellent grasp on the language AND the culture. When I was an intern in Germany the owner of the agency told me I couldn’t translate because I had made two errors in translations that were way beyond my abilities (texts on steel processing and making paper). He did not consider the 40+ other translations that I had translated before that without a single complaint and with nothing but praise. I stayed in Germany and proved him wrong, supporting myself as a freelancer for five more years (and have never again accepted a translation that was beyond my abilities). When I moved back to the United States I had to market myself and worked very hard by sending out resumes and networking, attending conferences, participating in listservs, writing articles for my local and national translation associations, and presenting at ATA conferences. If I had listened to all those people who kept telling me I wasn’t good enough I wouldn’t be where I am today – a single woman who supports herself as a freelance translator. I don’t need to have a second job to pay the rent. I am successful doing something that I love.

I get really tired of hearing people complain on listservs about the ATA, about clients who don’t pay on time, about agencies and their deadlines, about prices, about their colleagues, etc. Life is what YOU make of it. So the next time you find yourself wanting to complain ask yourself “Are you a whiner or a winner?” and act like a winner. I promise it will be self-fulfilling.