The Importance of Rest Time to a Freelance Writer

Freelance writers have the best job on the planet. Working in your jammies and not having to mind the clock means a freelance writer is working at his own pace. No worries about having to rush home, chores can be done while the work waits. Hey, there are only two requirements for a freelance writer, that is the deadline is met and the quality of the work is top-notch. In exchange, writers get premium money amounts into their bank accounts that push towards a retirement fund or savings for a rainy day. The ease by which a freelance writer can make money is the strongest driving force that turns most writers into workaholics.

Once the writer becomes obsessed with the work and the dollar figures that it brings in, the writer tends to sacrifice his rest time. Working straight through the weekends and not making time to do much except work, the freelance writer doesn't realize that by sacrificing his rest time, he is doing himself and his clients a disservice. There are several important reasons that a writer needs to plot a pocket of time to take time off from work, reasons that look out for a writer's professional and personal health.

The Human Body is Not a Machine

Unless you happen to be a computer that runs on a battery back-up, the human body requires an ample amount of time to recharge. While machines are designed to run without rest, the human body will break down if the writer doesn't get enough sleep. Eating out of schedule is also something that can adversely affect a writer both professionally and personally. So freelance writers need to acknowledge the importance of having at least 8 hours of sleep per night and at least 3 hours of break during the workday. All the income a writer earns will be worthless if he sacrifices his health and ends up spending all the money earned on hospital bills.

The Brain is a Complex Human Organ that Needs Rest

The brain of the freelance writer is the tool by which he completes his work. Aside from his hands, the mind that functions within the capacity of the brain in the completion of the written task. The pressure placed on the writer when it comes to meeting the deadline of a project causes stress on the mind. The sub-conscious of the brain cannot turn off even during rest hours then the stress factor can cause both physical and psychological problems for the writer's health.

A brain without rest is a useless brain. It cannot think, process what it is reading, nor translate it as a valid explanation in writing. So take the time to complete the 8 hours of sleep the brain needs to function properly. That is the only way you will get your work done faster. A rested brain is a creative brain.

Mental Health is Just as Important as Physical Health

A freelance writer does not engage in manual labor. His physical health is not always compromised because he is safely tucked away behind a computer screen during work hours. Some people will see this as another reason why freelance writing is the perfect job when actually, there is another aspect of health that a writer sometimes fails to consider, his mental health.

Freelance writers are prone to suffer the effects of Chronic stress due to the intense deadlines of the job. Chronic stress has often been linked to other illnesses such as alcoholism or drug addiction, anxiety, mood changes, and severe depression. While all of these illnesses have other underlying conditions associated with it, mental health has been seen as strong contributing factor in these instances. People who undergo stressful incidents in life, such as short turn around deadlines or difficult clients tend to look for an outlet for their stress and they usually turn to psychological enhancers to deal with their problems. Try to set up a vacation period for yourself every so often to give your brain time to relax and a chance to recharge the brain cells. Do something different to help the brain recover from the stresses of the job.

Build Personal and Business Relationships

A freelance writer tends to prioritize work over personal relationships. While most people call Friday nights the start of their weekend, to a freelance writer, Friday night is just another work night because of a deadline that needs to be met. The call of friends to come down and unwind with them normally go unheeded. When a freelance writer does not take the time to get away from work to be with real people, he could just end up tanking those relationships, leaving him alone when he really needs the company. A writer needs friends to help him get away from his job.

Freelance writers tend to become loners because of the job requirements. Turning into a hermit should not be the ambition of any person, but that is what normally happens to freelance writers. They live lives that seem hermit like because the work is never left at the office for them. The work is always at home.

Don't forget the importance of socialization. Freelance writers can still work while having fun with friends. It's called networking. A writer never knows whom he might meet while being out with friends. Exchanging electronic calling cards just may lead to a writer's next big payday.

The Real World as a Source of Inspiration

Freelance writers became writers in the first place because of their ability to see the world around them through a different set of lenses. Being out there, socializing, talking to people, observing them while having a cup of coffee, joining a weekend sports team, or attending a writing seminar will all help the writer become even better at his job.

An academic research writer must see the world, understand what is happening within it, and formulate an personal understanding of the current world we live in so that his writing will always refer to the most current opinions, research, and experiences in relation to the topic for writing.

Some freelance writers see rest time or taking time off from work as a day or a weekend spent not earning. The job should never be all about making money. A balance needs to be found between earning and resting. When the two are out of balance, it is the writer who suffers the consequences in the end.

It's a lot simpler than that. The freedom to work on your own schedule without having to worry about alarm clocks or regular office hours and/or any commute back and forth to work are balanced out by the fact that we work most days of our lives, and our non-work schedules and freedom to pursue our other interests necessarily revolve around our project schedules and that things can get very busy and hectic during the busiest seasons. That some more traditional industries require much heavier work patterns during some parts of the year is not that unusual: and that's essentially the same situation faced any anybody who's primary limit on earning are production factors that correspond to various calendars. Lawyers on trial are overworked and sleep deprived for many weeks and CPAs are swamped with private clients every winter.

I can't speak for others, but I'd suggest that this isn't a good job for anybody who doesn't already lean toward being a hermit; because if that's not normally your style, you will find this work even more stressful. I've always had nocturnal and hermit-like tendencies and I remember the first time I ever saw someone doing what I wanted to do for a living: John Travolta was just writing on a laptop on his own couch. About 20 years ago, I was working as an Athletic Director and I asked my tech Guru how long it might be until someone like me could earn a living writing like this from home. He said it shouldn't be longer than a few more years, which turned out to be exactly the case.

It's not too difficult to know when you're writing too much because you start blowing off other things and, more importantly, the quality of your work begins to deteriorate noticeably. With practice, an experienced writer learns how to plan for busy seasons and how to keep up the work quality during peak season. Just as is the case with many other jobs, you'll often find yourself with no alternative to working constantly, but by the time you've been doing this for any length of time, you learn how to prioritize your work and make short-term corresponding changes to the rest of your life so that you can focus on your work and on making more money than you do for most of the rest of the year. We are well designed to adapt to large work loads periodically, which hardly poses the same challenges as having to deal with that volume of work and the stress associated with it over longer periods of time, or on a permanent basis rather than according to predictable relatively short term situations.

The otherwise-inexplicable Travolta reference above was from the 1985 movie Perfect in which he played a journalist. (Note to self: Don't post on Ambien.) All I knew was that if there was a way to earn a living by sitting on my couch writing on a computer, that's what I wanted to do.

I don't know what, if anything to add to this. There isn't a better job on the planet for couch surfers. Honestly, when this took off I was in heaven. I can get up whenever I want, do how much/little I want, and I don't have to worry about socializing with coworkers.. Perfect

There is a tendency for a freelance writer to become a workaholic. They seem to find it hard to say no to the work because the money they earn is that good. I have had writers in my employ who turned into writing automatons who churned out paper after paper, after paper with nary a break in-between. They did not recognize legal holidays, nor did they cut back on their work hours during the summer. Eventually, they would burn-out and get sick, causing my company scheduling related problems. Just like the OP says, the human body is not a machine and it is not designed to work on a 24/7 basis.

When I began to notice this pattern developing among my writers, I instructed my writer supervisory team to force the writers to take rest days. My instructions were clear, for every 10 successive orders, the writer was to be placed on a mandatory rest period of 24 hours. During the hot season, the rest period could extent to 72 hours for every 15 papers completed.

Since I was on the lookout for the health of my writers, which they were not doing for themselves, I had writers who were forced to rest. As I explained to them when they asked why there were now mandatory days off, I would rather that they spend the money they earn on things other than medicines or hospital bills. They should not work themselves to the bone. They can't enjoy their income that way. They mostly understood and have now come to be thankful for the mandatory rest days every month.

@Write Review
And once again you venture into the "I ordered" territory. I honestly don't know what or who you employ but there is no way I would let anybody tell me/let alone order me to take a day off. Your writers are either desperate or just don't know any better. What I do know is there isn't any writer I am aware of that would take this sort of treatment from a company and stay there long-term. When I'm tired, I'll rest, when I feel like travelling I travel, but I don't let anybody tell me when to work or when not to work. The description of this job is - work when you want, how much you want, for whomever you want. If you're paying your writers' paid leave, 401k, health insurance, and taxes then you can tell them when to work. If not, they're pretty much free to do whatever they want as long as they deliver papers on time.

What are "successive" orders? Every project that a writer takes is "successive" in relation to his previous orders. How could you possibly ever even know when your writers are actually writing their projects in relation to their due dates unless all of them are rush projects due the same day they're ordered or the next day?

As anybody who has ever written for or run an essay company knows, only a small fraction of projects are due the same day that they're ordered (or even the next day). The vast majority of the projects that essay companies list for their writers have due dates of at least several days; many times, they're not due for a week or more. When I was still primarily writing for essay companies, I had as many as 20 projects on my calendar at a time and they were usually spread out over at least the whole next week; and I was a writer who took relatively few orders that had long deadlines, notwithstanding company rules against taking only (or "mostly") rush projects that was never enforced on me (or even mentioned). An essay company only knows when writers take orders and when they upload them to the system after completion. They had no idea, or even any way that they could possibly have known, what days in between those two dates I may have chosen to rest or spend my time doing something else, including writing for my own clients or for clients of other companies for which their writers may work.

The only metrics that essay companies use to monitor or control their writers' work are the quality of their projects, how often they miss deadlines, how many justified rewrite requests they get, and how often they're requested (or complained about) by customers. I wrote for the company widely acknowledged to be the biggest and best in the United States and probably also the most profitable. They relied disproportionately heavily on their four or five best and highest-volume writers (including me) than on their many other writers, and we sometimes averaged several projects daily, and for many months at a time. They even encouraged us to work as much as possible, sometimes by awarding a television to the writer who wrote the most in a given month; and when they did that, they counted total pages written, not projects. When I started with them, there was a limit (only) on how many projects I could take per day, not on how many projects I could put on my calendar; and all I ever had to do to raise that limit was ask. I haven't written anything for them since 2013, but my writer's account is still active and the current limit on my account is 15 projects taken off the assignment board per day.

The idea that the company would ever have "instructed" us to take days off is plainly ludicrous, aside from the fact that they had no way of knowing what days we wrote or, consequently, any way of enforcing that. If anything, we high-volume producers were the writers they approached directly with requests to handle emergency and/or extreme-rush projects and/or projects for friends and family members of the company owners and/or reps even when our calendars were already overflowing. If we ever replied that we were already too booked up to take on another project, their response would typically be to offer us more money for those projects, not to "instruct" or "order" us to take a rest day. That simply does not happen, mainly for the reason explained in my first paragraph above: namely, because the company can't possibly even know what days we're actually working or not working in the first place, and would have no sensible way of enforcing any such rule.

What happened to this biggest company; did they let you go or didn't renew your contract? (if you were that valuable to them, they would want to keep you, no?)

This issue does not only encompass freelance writers, I find. Freelancers in general have a hard time detaching from work. The accessibility of all the workload is clear and obvious. You wake up in the morning - and the first thing you do is open your email to check if there are new messages from work. There have been articles regarding this (eg. independent.co.uk/news/business/news/working-from-home-might-be-bad-for-you-a6690916.html). It is difficult to get "off" of work when you cannot just clock in. When you're a freelancer, especially, you take what you can. If you have an opportunity to earn more, most people would opt to take in as much load because there's justno assurance of a steady flow of income.

Moreover, I find that most essay writing agencies prefer to control the flow of work dedicated to a writer. They would work through some system wherein they ask a writer (who is taking up too much workload) if they can truly manage to finish all the orders that they're taking. It's dragging - but it's all part of work.

That is not consistent with my experience as a company writer. They did start off limiting how many projects I could take, but that limit only applied to how many orders I could accept per day; and there was never any limit on how many pending projects I could have on my account at the same time. In fact, they encouraged us all to take as much work as possible, such as by awarding a TV or an iPad for the most pages written in a month. Other times, they'd reach out directly to a few of us to ask whether we could take on particularly difficult projects and/or projects for "VIP" customers, such as the family members of staff, etc. Usually, these special requests came in during the highest points of busiest seasons when they could see that we already had 15 or 20 pending deadlines on our accounts for that week and if we responded that we were already too booked up, they would usually increase the bonus they were offering until one of us accepted the order.

Exercise While Working?

I've seen an influx of treadmill workstations and exercise bike desks for home use. I was wondering if anybody has actually tried these products? Does it really allow a person to work and exercise at the same time? Or does it simply divide the attention of the person? I realize that writing jobs tend to create sedentary lifestyles for most people. Which is probably the reason these devices were invented. Although I have a regular gym membership, I was wondering if I could save on the yearly fees and open up more work time for myself by just buying one of these exercise gadgets. Some say that the exercise routine while typing away and / or reading helps open up creative thinking, allows for better breathing, and in the process, results in better brain activity. I think it will just make me tired before I can finish the job. Thoughts anyone?