Freelance Friday: Grammarly As A Writing Power Tool

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FreelanceFriday_GrammarlyWelcome to a new series here on Life [Comma] Etc! Each Friday, I share something Freelance-y that I learn each week. Thanks for reading!

Freelance writing can do weird things to your writing sensibilities. One day you’re closely reading Anna Karenina and taking in every tiny detail. The next day you’re posting a blog post with three embarrassing, obvious typos.

Fortunately, there’s a line of defense you can implement that will do a mega-Spellcheck on your work before sending it in to paying clients. Enter: Grammarly.


I did a trial a few weeks ago and was really impressed by the in-depth analysis of the proofreading checker and grammar checker. Since I’m still on a shoestring budget, I decided not to pay for the program this year, but I made a note to check it out again when I’ve got spending money. A few weeks later I was contacted by Grammarly to accept a free trial in exchange for talking about how I use it!

Grammarly is my Backup Editor

I write and edit a lot of content on a weekly basis. Since no one is perfect, that means there’s a lot of potential for letting simple errors slip through to clients.

I don’t like the sound of that!

To prevent those forehead-smacking errors (that I totally know, but somehow let slip… you know the ones!), I use Grammarly as my last line of defense. When I think a piece is perfect, I run it through the program and usually find two or three errors that I’m glad I caught.

This makes me better at my job, and makes the jobs of my clients and editors much easier.

I haven’t yet tried out the word-choice feature or the proofreader feature, but I plan to in the future for larger features I am writing. I love that you can scale your needs depending on the project, and change the editing mode based on the piece you’re writing (blog post, feature, business casual, etc).

Do you have any power tools to share?

March Goals: Quarterly Taxes, New Vegetables, and Dynamic Catholicism

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You can find a review of how I did in February  below this post!

March Goals

March! The month of Lent, of the ides, and of freak winter storms. Here are my goals for March:

Brain

What can I do to stay in peak mental state — feeling spry and creative but not overwhelmed?

  • Read two books for fun. This was a great goal for last month, and I’d like to continue it by reading two more in the month of March.
  • Attend a Dynamic Catholic event. This is a bit of a cheat, since we already purchased tickets for Matthew Kelly’s Dynamic Catholic series. I can’t wait! I read the book and loved it, and I think the live event will be inspiring.

Heart

What can I do to move along my physical and emotional health?

  • Try out a yoga practice 3x per week. I have kept ahold of two copies of Yoga Journal for years. They both espouse the amazingness of a simple yoga practice on all of the issues I face — hormones, depression, tiredness, back pain, etc. So let’s get that ball rolling with a very simple, very lazy 3x per week yoga practice. My only requirements are me touching the mat for at least 10 minutes… be that laying down in stretch poses or moving around with stability poses. To get this done, I’ll set a calendar event for three mornings per week.
  • Try new vegetable combinations. The Paleo AIP diet can get very repetitive and quickly get you stuck in a rut. Sometimes it just feels like meat-meat-meat-broccoli-meat. Which I guess is okay when you eat the sausage I eat, but to help me feel more energized about food I want to try a few new vegetable combinations each week outside of sweet potato and broccoli.

Cash

What moves will get JHubbs and I to solid financial footing?

  • Replenish and hold our safety net at $1000. We’re at $500 right now, so this goal really has two parts: keep the $500 in there, and add another $500.
  • Save enough for my quarterly taxes. Only now do I truly understand the horror that is quarterly taxes. As we scrimp together to cover our bills, there’s a $4K+ one looming for April 15th to cover my quarterly taxes. My goal is to pay it on time (as opposed to putting a payment plan into place, which would make things more complicated and difficult moving forward). This leads directly into goal #3.
  • Sock away 30 percent of every incoming invoice. It would be so much less stressful to not view the money as mine in the first place — the minute it comes in, it goes into my tax account as not-ours. It’s just so hard to see money come in and not go directly to our needs! Though I guess I should consider taxes a need? Of course I should.

Future

What will future-Sarah wish I had done to help her along in life?

  • Meet with a friend once per week. Weather-permitting, I guess? I’d like to continue to work on my conversational skills (which need it) and my personal relationships (which feel weird sometimes, even when everything is fine). To that extent, I want to plan a solo date with a friend once per week. This is in addition to rather regular [awesome] weekend hangouts with a group of friends from church.
  • Work through course 2 of Brandgasm copy and design. We’re going to go a little slower this time in hopes that I can really get it done. If I get through lesson 3 as well, that’d be great, but lesson 2 is the goal. 

Here’s How I Did In February

Did I stick to my guns? Did I get’er done? Let’s find out…

Brain

What can I do to stay in peak mental state — feeling spry and creative but not overwhelmed?

  • Read two books for fun. I did great, plowing through Anna Karenina, The Art of Possibility, and
  • Play Bananagrams with JHubbs once per week. I didn’t complete this goal. We played board games with friends early in the month, and I played Words With Friends on my iPhone a few more times.

Heart

What can I do to move along my physical and emotional health?

  • Step outside each day. I did a great job at this until I hurt my back in late February, so I’m going to count it as a semi-win :-).
  • Finish researching Hashimoto’s TH1/TH2. I got distracted by some hormonal issues this month and fell off the research bandwagon here. I spent most of my time fighting research on Estradiol.

Cash

What moves will get JHubbs and I to solid financial footing?

  • Replenish and hold our safety net at $500. Completed! The hardest part is to KEEP this cash in here, though, so I’ll continue to keep this as a goal.
  • Have four “Pitch Days”. I had one real pitch day, but I count this as a win because I had enough work from current clients and referrals to not “need” to pursue new clients. Cause for a mini celebration!

Future

What will future-Sarah wish I had done to help her along in life?

  • Choose a life insurance program. I completed the paperwork and had a health evaluation for the life insurance process. I think I should have this tied up in the next month!
  • Work through courses 1-4 of Brandgasm copy AND design. I even recruited JHubbs to help me work through this, but that only made our procrastinating worse. I think I need to set smaller goals and aim for only one session per month. That’s better than nothing when it comes to this amazing resource!

What are your goals for March?

Freelance Friday: Project Paralysis

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FreelanceFriday_ProjectPara

Welcome to Freelance Friday! Each Friday, I’ll share something Freelance-y that I learned during the week that will help other freelancers or entertain cubicle-queens. Thanks for reading!

I call this project paralysis just to fit some alliteration in there. It can also take the form of billing paralysis, cleaning paralysis, and cooking paralysis. Sometimes even at the same time.

It’s the feeling if sitting inside the eye of the hurricane, knowing that there are very important, very fun things that need to be done. But finding no. Motivation. Whatsoever.

Project Paralysis Feels Awful

No doubt a lot of people in a number of industries feel this way. You’re in your office or your home office with a mile-long to-do list of opportunities, projects, and ideas to move forward. But all of these ideas compete to get out through the same door (you). And so they get stuck.

Here’s an example of where my mind goes:

I can’t start drafting the new infographic until I have a blog post queued up. I want to have the formatting stage of the huge copywriting project done today, but that other blog post is due first so I should do it. This one isn’t due for a week,  but you know what? I think I’ll do that one first… but should I?

None of these ideas ever help me get started or get motivated, they just spin around endlessly while I literally stare at my Macbook.

And here’s how I break through it: I do something. Anything. Quickly.

Doing Something Gets the Gears Turning

When I feel this way, usually around 10am on Thursdays (AKA yesterday), I have to grab myself by the scruff of my neck and DO SOMETHING.

Sometimes that’s something physical, and I find it helps to move myself physically. Maybe that’s a walk around the neighborhood, or an errand in town, or laundry, dishes, and vacuuming. It could be as simple as taking a shower or cooking lunch a little early just to break it up.

Sometimes that’s something mental, and I pick a random project to knock off my to do list like writing a personal email, a hand-written note, or making a doctor’s appointment.

What matters is that I move forward and use my time in a way that gets something done, even if it’s not “the thing I need to get done today.” Even with an important deadline on the horizon, the only way to get off the paralysis train is to step away from the keyboard to get moving. Otherwise you reach the end of the day with tired eyes and nothing to show for it.

Have you suffered from project paralysis? How do you get a handle on it?