Last Updated on March 4, 2024
Oops, it’s nearly lunchtime and you have barely started writing yet… you have spent the entire morning checking email, surfing the web, watching funny videos and staring into space. It was fun to be lazy for a while, but now it looks like you are going to be working late again to meet your deadlines!
Although one of the advantages of working from home is being able to manage your own schedule and be a bit lazy sometimes, being too lazy can really hinder your success as a copywriter. If you can’t meet deadlines or get work done, you will fall behind and not be able to make a living in this career. However, if you can learn to curtail your natural lazy tendencies, you can get your work done quicker, have more time for leisure and make more money!
If you need a kick up the behind to snap yourself out of a lazy haze, here are some tips:
Get More Sleep
Perhaps the reason why your eyes are glazing over in the middle of an article and find yourself flicking through page after page of funny web comics saying to yourself, “I’ll start writing after I read one more…” is because you are actually too tired to be writing.
In order to work on your copywriter at your maximum capacity you need to be well rested, otherwise your brain will slow down and stall. Go to bed earlier and get at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night. Getting more exercise, drinking more water and eating healthier will help to cure insomnia and improve the quality of your sleep.
Reduce Distractions
There are many little distractions throughout the day which can pull you away from concentrating on your copywriting. Once you have been distracted, it is much harder to get back into working-mode again and it is very easy to get lazy. Try to avoid checking your personal emails, scrolling through your Facebook feed, chatting with friends and other distractions as much as possible when you are trying to get work done. Save them for “break time” when you have completed all of your tasks.
Eat the Frog
The expression to “eat the frog” means to get the most unpleasant task out-of-the-way at the beginning of the day. This is a great way to get your most dreaded jobs finished in the morning when you have the most energy and are least likely to be lazy. If you leave them to the end of the day it is much easier to say “I’m too tired, I’ll do that tomorrow.”
When you make your to-do list, place the hardest or largest assignment right at the very top of the list and get started on it first thing in the morning. Get it over with right away instead and the rest of your day will be much easier in comparison.
Set Mini-Deadlines
Freelance copywriters are often victims of the unfortunate aspects of Parkinson’s Law. This is a principle which states that any work expands to fill the time available for it to be completed. For example, if you give yourself a week to complete a task which should only take three hours, the task will increase in complexity and become so huge that it fills the week. However, if you only had a smaller amount of time to complete the same task, it would reduce in complexity and you would be able to complete it no problem. Another way of saying this is that the more time you have to complete a certain task, the slower you will work and the more time you will waste.
For example, if I have three blog posts to write and 6 hours to do them in, I will finish the blog posts in 6 hours. However, if I only had three hours to write the blog posts in I would likely finish them in only 3 hours. You can use Parkinson’s Law to your advantage by making mini-deadlines for yourself to complete your tasks as quickly as possible. For each article that you need to write, estimate how long it would normally take you to write it and then divide this time in half. Set a timer and tell yourself you must be finished before it goes off. You will be surprised by how much faster and more efficiently you work.
Employ these techniques and you will be able to do more with less time and say goodbye to laziness!
Do you ever get lazy when you are working on your copywriting? Here are a few tips which will help you jumpstart your productivity again.
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