Andrea reblogged—retumbld? reposted?—Amber Rae's "Unconventional Dictionary" proposal, which includes this entry:

procrastination. noun.
1 - your body’s way of rebelling against what your mind says you “should be doing.”
2 - an indication that you are working on the wrong thing. 

And I like the idea behind that. As my journal's long-term subtitle ("We Put the 'Pro' in 'Procrastination'", for those of you who might be reading this somewhere other than directly on my LiveJournal page) indicates, I'm no stranger to procrastination. I've long since accepted that it's a necessary part of my working process, it's apparently a means for my brain to come around to coping with work or organizing my thoughts subconsciously while I'm apparently distracting myself with irrelevant stuff. I think I've even written about that before, although I'm not finding any such posts by doing a quick check of the recent posts tagged "me" (to be fair, that's a lot of them) and I don't have a "procrastination" tag or anything else obvious to check (maybe "work" or "writing", perhaps). Oh wait, this is probably the post I was thinking of: "thought time, or indirect work". It's related, at least. Ha, and I wrote it a year ago, interesting. I know I'm also thinking about some other article or blog post on procrastination that Andrea must've linked at some time in the past and that I think I reposted on Facebook.

Anyhow, the point of all that is this. While I like the idea behind that definition, while it seems to sit well both with my own typical behavior and with other articles I've read in the past, it leaves me with a fundamental problem. What am I to do when I don't have time for procrastination? When I've agreed to do a project, and it's already running late, and I'm up against the need to get it done as soon as possible, but I'm still finding it difficult to move forward on it without spending a lot of time not looking at it? When it's already two in the morning and I don't particularly want to stay up another three hours finishing the work, but I really need it sent off before the start of the normal workday in the morning because I have other things to do tomorrow and again because the client would really like it done, now? 

Well, in this case apparently what I do is come to LiveJournal and write a post about it. And now I'll go back to struggling with finishing up this project.

Ugh. This month so far has been nearly overwhelming, with so much going on. Musically, I had Decibel Festival over the first weekend, and I've now got the City Arts Fest coming up this week. Health-wise, I came down with a cold after Decibel Festival, which knocked me down for a couple days; but this past week I've been riding my bike every day to KEXP for work. Volunteer-wise, I had the KEXP Fall Membership Drive. Work-wise, today I just finished up my week of full-time work at KEXP auditing the data entry for the membership drive; that meant a sudden big shift in my schedule as I had to get up a couple hours earlier than usual in order to be there during normal business hours. I also had a few bigger projects overlapping that week to do as well, so I've been running short on sleep and feeling pretty tired. I'm still working now on finishing a paper for tomorrow, I've got another project belatedly kicking off tomorrow, and another project that's turned into a bigger commitment.

All that work is good, because my finances collapsed on me at the start of the month—I basically had no work for six weeks in July and August, so I wasn't able to pay my credit cards or mortgage in September, so my credit cards have been cut off and my mortgage lender is threatening foreclosure. The mortgage situation is actually the less serious one, in that I'm already applying for an adjustment under the federal "Home Affordable Mortgage Program" (HAMP), so I can put off the foreclosure threat for a little while and hopefully avoid it entirely with some combination of an adjustment and increasing work/income. The credit card situation is more serious in that I've been relying on the two cards to cover my regular living expenses like food and transportation, and clearly I can't do that any longer. I'm getting some help from friends, it looks like I've got more work coming in for the next few months, I'm going to get by. Getting work is still the primary issue; I've known that I really haven't been making a living, I've just been staving off collapse, and I finally let it slip too far. I think I'm finally going to see more work coming in regularly, but I do still need to find more sources as well, or investigate returning to part-time or full-time employment. 

Negotiations for a settlement on last year's car crash are continuing. I think that's all I can or should say about that. But, that is something else to remark upon: a year ago tonight, at this time, I was in the hospital having narrowly avoided death or major bodily harm in the car crash. For all that this month's been nearly overwhelming, I'm still here, alive, to face it and live through it.

This week is the 2011 Decibel Festival, which I'm very excited to once again be attending as a blogger for KEXP. It starts Wednesday afternoon with the conference sessions—the music programming starts in the evening—and runs through Sunday night. And next week is the KEXP fall membership drive, when I'm doing three volunteer shifts, and the week after that will be my now-usual full-week contract at KEXP to audit the data entry. 

Naturally, that means this is the week when I'm involved in editing a paper that could range up to 200 pages, that's already been pushed back a week, and that still doesn't have all the sections turned in from the various authors or reviewers. I also have been expecting another few documents from another client, which mercifully seem to be still in limbo somewhere (I should probably drop that client a note…), and I just gave an estimate of needing a day to turn around another document that could drop on me at any time. Plus I know there's another big project coming up, and always the potential for other work to come up at short notice—I rarely get any kind of advance notice, unless it's a really big project.

Why couldn't some of this work have shown up in August, when I really needed some? Yes, I know, August is always slow. Yes, I'm grateful to have some coming in now, when I desperately need it. (Know anyone who needs any kind of business/marketing/non-fiction editing? Put them in contact with me!) I'm just saying, the timing could be better, and more evenly spaced.

So, I don't know how much I'll be posting for the rest of the week. I'll try to at least toss up a daily photo from Decibel Festival, but even that is trickier when I'm borrowing a digital camera (thanks again Gina) instead of using my iPhone camera (still broken). Meanwhile, back to editing this paper…

I've been busy today working on editing a paper. It turned out to be a nice day weather-wise, and I would've liked to have left the house, but besides the paper I was also doing laundry as usual for Sunday. I probably should have put that off for a while just to have had the short walk over to Caffe Ladro. But then, it didn't really get nice until later in the afternoon, at which point I was already halfway through the laundry and started on the paper, and I didn't want to interrupt any of that. 

I also haven't been out for a bike ride in over a week; I'm not getting out for rides as much as I wanted. That's partly because during the week I tend to head out for the afternoon to do work, and although it stays light out well into the evening, by the time I'm getting home I'm thinking it's time to make dinner. One thing I need to do is figure out how to use the carrier rack I had installed on my bike; I need bungie cords or something to strap down my backpack with my computer in it. Then I could ride the bike out somewhere to work. I could just wear the backpack but it's kind of heavy with the laptop and whatnot in it, and that would make me even sweatier by the time I got somewhere to work.

And you know, I'm really sick of the way Safari hangs all the time when I'm running Parallels as well. I presume my combination of RAM and graphics card just isn't quite enough to handle things, but really Safari does seem kind of bloated and slower than it ought to be. I persist in using it because I like it otherwise and I like that my bookmarks are synched between my two Macs and my iPhone through my MobileMe account—that feature better not be going away with iCloud—but it does irritate me a lot.

I don't have plans for the holiday tomorrow. I'd really like to be hanging out with friends and having fun, but I never asked anyone ahead of time what their plans were, and no one got in touch with me to see what I was up to, either. On the other hand, I'm probably still going to have work to do, and I certainly have a bunch of other projects to tend to, so maybe it's better that I have some time to do things.

Speaking of doing things, time to get back to editing that paper.

I've been working on my resume this afternoon, seeing if I can condense my two-page general-purpose resume down into a single-page sales sheet, not so much "here's my employment history" as "here are the skills and work I can do for you". I'm torn about it: as I want to pick up more clients as a project-based freelance contractor, that's the sort of thing I think I need, but as I still want to get agents to do the project-finding work for me, I think a traditional resume is what I need to have. Certainly the agencies I've talked to in the past have all made it clear that I would be an employee of their agency, and they've all wanted a resume usually in addition to filling out their own resume form on their websites. I do already have a one-sheet version of my resume focusing just on my editorial skills and services, but I've been hoping to branch out into doing more page-layout work and maybe non-technical non-software (copy)writing, and that's why I want to get a one-sheet to cover the variety of work I'm capable of doing. At the same time, as I never go out and do the footwork of approaching potential new clients cold, it seems like an exercise in futility. It'd be good to have when opportunities come up, which does happen occasionally, but it's been so rare as to seem like just more filler to avoid finding work.

Likewise I still haven't updated my big list of projects I've worked on, because although it seems like a useful and impressive thing, it's not something anyone's ever asked for, and it's a lot of work to update it. I need a better way to be able to convert my project hours tracking list into the project CV list. I know this is something that XML should be good for, and in theory that I should be able to do without a lot of difficulty as the modern Excel file format is XML-based, but in practice I don't know how to get what I want.

Oh yes, then there's the obvious "forget all that crap and get in touch with some agencies, a task that's been on your list for nearly a year." Well, it's a holiday weekend, so that's something I should do tomorrow for Tuesday. I know part of my reluctance there is that, based on the times I've talked to them in the past, I'll be stuck in the "Microsoft copyeditor" hole, when what I want is for them to help me find other sources of work as well as other types. I already do Microsoft copyediting, get paid better than the agencies are willing to pay me, and don't have to commit to being on campus every day for months at a time. On the other hand, if the project-based occasional work were sufficient, I wouldn't be planning to seek help from the agencies. Grarh. I'm just going around in circles here.

Anyhow, Cafe Ladro's about to close, so that's good for today.

I wanted to go out dancing this evening. The Sweatbox crew have a monthly residency at the Baltic Room called "Off the Deep End", and apparently it's free. Instead, I'm not even half a block away at Bauhaus, doing some editing work. I don't really mind—it's good to have work to do, of course, and I already have plans to go see Hotels tomorrow night at the Sunset Tavern. The work is also lighter than I expected, enough that I'm thinking about dropping by anyhow, though I don't really want to be there with my computer in my backpack and have to worry about that. But I'm even thinking that it might've been fun just to go lounge there—if I could find a free couch and table upstairs—to do my work, skipping the dancing. I know I'd like the background music (although it might be a bit loud for concentrating on work), and I've often thought it'd be nice to go out to a bar or lounge in the evenings to do work, rather than to a coffee shop.

I have a few reservations about that idea. One is that the place has to have a good atmosphere for working. That shouldn't be too hard—Bauhaus Coffee for example is always playing loud music and has a lot of people coming and going or passing by, so there are plenty of distractions and yet I'm able to work here. However, at the coffee shops people are generally there to work or at least socialize amongst their own group; I think at a bar I'd be slightly more likely to have random people attempt to start a conversation with me. Another reservation is that at most coffee shops, I can get a hot chocolate and a snack and be good for a few hours without feeling obliged to get anything else—if I'm there a really long time I might get a second drink or snack, but generally it's okay as long as I've got something. At a bar, I'd feel more obliged to get an alcoholic drink because soda is negligible, cheap snack food generally is not an option (or else it's some kind of appetizer I don't really want or won't finish), and I don't (yet) feel comfortable with the idea that I could just hang out there for a few hours working while having had just one drink (if alcoholic). A third reservation is more practical: my laptop battery power is limited, particularly if I'm doing work (which means I'm running Windows at the same time, which I believe is a greater power drain than just running the Mac OS by itself as usual), and bars don't usually seem to have readily-accessible power outlets. A final reservation would be finding a place with free WiFi access, as I actually do often need Internet access in order to do my work (and not just to have distractions for taking a break from work). 

i know all of those reservations can be easily overcome, and I know some people do go out and do work in bars. I just haven't felt strongly enough to try stepping into some places and seeing if I can work there. I have been thinking about trying the recently-opened White Rabbit in Fremont, because they do advertise that they have free WiFi and because they're right near my home so it's an easy walk. Plus, I've been there once already for a show, so I have a general idea of the seating availability and comfort level. (And they're actually billing themselves as a "comfortable cafe" during the afternoon for hanging out.) But I know they also do live music in the evenings, and that's the kind of busy noisy atmosphere that won't work. A more lounge-like place such as the Baltic Room, with DJs spinning rather than a live band, would be better; but the Baltic Room also probably won't be a good option as it's a dance club more than a lounge. I should ask around for suggestions, but I'm not even sure who I could ask—as I said, I know some people will go out to a pub or bar to do work, but my feeling is that it isn't that common. But then how would I know, as I'm not doing it myself.

Recently when I was out with my computer headed home from a coffee shop and thinking about how I still had work to do and didn't particularly feel like staying in at home yet, it occurred to me that part of my objection is just the idea or image of lugging my backpack in to a bar and hefting out the laptop. I realized that if I had an iPad, I would feel a lot more casual and relaxed about bringing that in to a bar and hanging out. I probably couldn't do that for work—I've made a point of having Windows installed on my laptop and using the Windows version of Microsoft Office when doing my work, just to be certain that what I'm looking at will be the same as what my clients have seen and will see. But still, I suddenly had a stronger interest in getting an iPad than I have so far. Right now there's no way I can justify the expense, but down the road if I can get things together, I'd like to make that happen.

Okay, let's try looking at things a different way.

First, as far as my week's gone, I'm clearly being pretty hard on myself. This is fair, for three reasons: one, it's an important aspect of my personal journal to critically analyze myself and make sure I'm aware of what I'm doing; two, as I mentioned, I have been continually neglecting to deal with work and financial issues, with the result that they've continued to slowly become more dire over time; three, it's another important aspect of my journal, as I've noted before, to simply vent about the things bothering me, so that instead of continuing to dwell on them I can set them down and then go do useful things. All that said, the week really wasn't as bad as all that; I was just upset by having just done my taxes and confronted myself with the stark reality, once again, that yes I've got problems I have to deal with. 

Now, about dealing with work problems. Let's look at my skill sets.

• I'm an excellent editor from proofreading to substantive editing levels. I haven't really done much in the way of developmental editing, which gets into project and author/client management—and I'm not sure whether I really want to do that anyhow—but when it comes to anything from quality control (proofreading) to improving a draft (substantive), I know my work is top notch. Most of what I do falls in the middle range of copyediting.
• Because of my eye for detail, head for organization, and speedy fingers for typing, I'm also very good at data entry, data verification, and content management.
• I'm a good writer. I feel that I tend to be slow at writing—maybe I'm not really slower than the average writer, but I wouldn't want to be the person called upon to do a couple pages of business writing in a half-hour, for example. I tend to agonize too much over getting it just right. Still, for at least some kinds of nonfiction writing, I'm very good, and some kinds I can write more quickly than others.
• I'm… not sure how to describe this skill set: layout technician? I'm not a graphic artist. I know the basics of graphic design, but wouldn't call myself a graphic designer. However, I can design decent basic layouts for documents, and I'm quite competent at placing content into a layout and adjusting things as necessary, whether using a predesigned template or one of my own layouts. I need to talk to John Harper about this, maybe he can help clarify how I should position myself.

All of these are things that I enjoy doing. If I were to choose one area to focus on for full-time work, it would be the editorial skills. I'm strongest at that, enjoy it a lot, and have the most professional experience with it already. But ideally I'd like to have opportunities to do work in all those areas, which suggests continuing as a freelance contractor on a project basis. I both enjoy the variety of work challenges and also believe making use of my diverse skill sets should give me more opportunities to find work.

What I'm not good at or strongly dislike:

• Searching for work and making contacts. This is why I should be paired with an agency, or even part of some kind of small consulting partnership or group in which someone with the business networking skills would be finding the projects and I'd be one of the people doing the projects. It's not even that I hate talking to people, but I do loathe having to make the initial contact with people I've never talked to before, for business purposes (personal or professional). 
• Office administration. You'd think that I'd be good at that, and I certainly have a lot of applicable skills, but it turns out I hate doing that kind of work. One reason I now shy away from the idea of seeking full-time editing work again is because I've now twice worked at small businesses which turned out not to have enough work to keep someone of my skills occupied full time, and I ended up having to take on office admin work, which quickly soured my spirits. And the thing is, I liked working at small companies; I'm not keen on working at a large corporation, and in any case it seems to me that editing jobs are increasingly scarce at large corporations because they can outsource them to contractors at less expense. This is another reason why I believe I should continue as a freelance contractor on a project basis.
• Project management. Technically this doesn't belong on the list; it's not that I'm not good at it or strongly dislike it, rather it's that I've done almost none of it. Whenever I've worked on any kind of a big project, I've almost always been a team member rather than a project leader, and because I've mostly worked at or for small companies, I've almost always been the only person involved in my part of the project, so I've rarely had opportunities to be a project leader. I've had a few projects in which I've had to do some kind of schedule and resource management and I've handled it fine, but it's so limited that I have no good idea whether I even like having that role, let alone how good or bad I may be in it.

So that's more detail on where I'm at, and why I'm still hoping and trying to make it as a freelance contractor rather than land some kind of full-time position. As I see it, my biggest challenge is finding potential opportunities and selling myself as a contractor; my second-biggest challenge, then, is finding some way to get others to do that for me. I haven't stayed in touch with the agencies (or still haven't contacted a couple agencies) as I should have; that's partly because the ones I've talked to before have themselves had few positions due to the economy, and partly because they've seemed to want to pigeonhole me as a Microsoft technical editor. I need to find ways to break out of that, but also I need to find ways to do more networking that can lead to getting projects. Really, that's all it comes down to: I've got a few clients that have been very happy with my work and will continue to send me projects as they have them, but it's still infrequent or inconsistent enough that I need to get several more clients. If I could just get to a steady 80 billable hours a month—that's only half-time work—I'd be able to stabilize my financial situation. I've been doing 20 to 40 hours a month more often than not, and that's not cutting it. Getting 100 to 120 or more hours a month? That would be fantastic. Getting there is the trouble.

Yesterday I had to plow my way through an edit pass on a 40-page paper. Unfortunately, I also came down sick with something. By the time I managed to get to the end of the paper, I was long past ready for bed.

Today I've spent almost the entire day in bed, getting up a couple times only to say, no, I don't want to be up. It's not a horrible serious sickness with nausea and the like, just kind of feverish with a constant headache and occasional cough, and just feeling run down and tired. After the past week of getting up two hours earlier than usual, but not getting to bed a lot earlier than usual, it's not surprising that I've become run down, but given my other symptoms I'm certain I picked up some kind of flu or something.

Unfortunately it meant that I had to miss the last day of my KEXP contract again—the second time this has happened, last fall's car crash being the first—and I feel really lame about that. The last thing I want is to start seeming unreliable and not be asked to continue. Still, they do have a very strict stay-home-if-sick policy, and while I may not be coughing or sneezing much, I'm definitely sick and definitely would not have been able to sit and focus well enough to get the work done. I'm sure they understand that. 

I finally got up around 7:15 to make myself some Lipton chicken noodle soup, which I really didn't feel like eating, but made myself do so anyhow. Now I'm just finishing a glass of cranberry and orange juice and writing this post, then I'll be off to bed again. Hopefully tomorrow I'll feel better.

One term I've recently been seeing in the draft documents I edit is "learnings". The term is used in a context such as this: "After the trial project completed, we applied our learnings to improve the service." Now, "learning" as a noun is essentially collective, meaning the body of knowledge one has gained through study or experience. It's not treated as a countable noun: you'd never have one learning, two learnings, many learnings. Clearly one should use a word such as "findings", "discoveries", or "lessons" in this context. 

But here's the problem of "learnings": it does make sense for a couple reasons. First, it's a logical extrapolation from "learn" as a verb. We learned about different things—problems, solutions, benefits, efficiencies, methods, best practices—during the trial period. It's logical to think that "things we learn(ed)" could be called "learnings". After all, things we find out are "findings." Second, it's not completely unreasonable to see "learnings" as carrying a particular and desirable shade of meaning apart from the existing correct synonyms. "Facts" doesn't really suit a concept such as "best practices". "Findings" or "discoveries" might be considered too random or happenstance. "Lessons" might be considered to imply a purposeful and directed teaching experience. But everyone knows that you can "learn by doing", that experience can teach you things without there being a concrete teacher. And so "learnings" may be considered to fit into that niche: "the things—methods as well as facts, best practices as well as problem solutions—we learned without the directed guidance of a teacher, but through the experience of a planned and managed project, not by haphazard guesswork without a larger goal." 

Part of my job as an editor is to facilitate communication: to make sure the language used is clear and concise, easily understood by the intended readers. Jargon such as "learnings" makes communication more difficult, because it's a non-standard use of a word, which means most people may not be familiar with that usage and may be confused by it. But this kind of jargon arises in part because someone thinks it makes their communication easier, and it expands and becomes prevalent as others pick up the usage and meaning. So I've realized that I get angry about this not only because it quickly becomes a persistent problem that I'm always having to correct (and explain my correction), but also because it is a useful term for some people in the context of their business, which means that I'm fighting a pointless struggle against the gradual evolution of the language. Someday "learnings" will be considered standard usage, just as the colloquial use of "leverage" and "email" as verbs will become accepted even by the current holdouts. And I just have to grit my teeth and fight against it with every paper I edit, until the editorial board of my corporate overlord finally concedes the battle.

However, the other annoying instance of jargon I've just recently started seeing is using "compute" as a noun to mean "computing resources" or "computer services" or "the act of using a computer": for example, "It provides scalable compute and storage." That has no good justification at all; it just makes you seem stupid. Don't do it.

And regardless of how English changes over time, "irregardless" also always makes you seem stupid.