When you don’t have enough hours in the day…
Oh, hi friends!
I feel like I race through every day, wondering where the hours go.
And then I realized I truly, truly had no idea it took me to complete things.
I thought an easy article would take me a full week to write. (It doesn’t.)
Or that research takes 15 minutes. (Uh, no.)
Or that a coffee meeting takes an hour. (Including travel time? LOLOL)
This made my days all wonky, because I always either felt behind (when I didn’t leave myself enough time to finish a task) or with not enough work to do (when tasks ended up much easier than I imagined).
Now I’m much more realistic—even when it hurts.
When I set my agenda for the week, I guess how long I think something will take:
— Revise story (1.5 hrs)
— Email press contact (10 mins)
— Crappy first draft of new piece (2 hrs)
Then I actually set a timer and see how accurate I am. (God, aren’t I fun??? Be my friend?)
Here’s the pattern I found: I routinely overestimated how long writing or filing invoices would take, and underestimated how long meetings or interviews would take.
Now I don’t have to slavishly set a timer for every task, but I have a better sense of where the hours go every day—simply because I know exactly where they're going.
“A piece about a ‘heavy' subject can be written a little bit light so the piece doesn’t seem quite as heavy. You’ve mainly got to trust yourself to write the way you feel about something.”
Thank you, 32-year-old Nora Ephron.
Also, "Trust the way you feel" is A+ advice for pretty much everything.
The business newsletter Morning Brew is seeking a full-time writer! Cool job.
Breather—the well-funded start-up that has neat little workspaces all over the city—is hiring a Junior Performance Copywriter.
Girlboss is hiring for two editorial jobs, Associate Editor and Branded Content Editor, for their offices in Silver Lake. (h/t Ladies Get Paid)
Droga5 is accepting applications for their paid internship program until March 30—I can’t say enough positive things about this agency, so if you’re looking to break into the ad world, apply!
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara