As a former computer programmer/ analyst, my entire mode of thinking is geared towards multi-tasking. As a former search engine webmaster and regular webmaster, there have been times where I’ve had to program on up to five computers simultaneously while also monitoring a half dozen websites or more and interacting with several people. It was part of the job.

As I’ve mentioned previously, multi-tasking isn’t about doing multiple tasks at the same time. It’s about managing multiple tasks simultaneously. There’s a difference. If you’re using technology, it’s even easier to to multi-task, as you can start something and let the technology take over as you do something else. Of course, you’ll have to come back to first item at some point, then repeat the cycle.

Now, you can apply multi-tasking principles in regular life as well. The only way to explain this is to give you a concrete example…

My whole mode of thinking for the past five years has been frugality out of necessity. I became a 100% bonafide starving artist/ freelance writer in Jan 2002, when my last computer contract was cut short in Dec 2001. The company had just built a new $40M facility north of Toronto, and the tech bubble had burst. Employees and contractors were cut. I was one of them.

I won’t get into a long discussion of what happened, but the result is that I’m now frugal about both money and time. It’s a bit weird being looked at with disdain by some people who think I’m cheap, especially when I used to be someone who threw money around like it was rice at a wedding.

No matter. I find that multi-tasking seems to be directly related to frugality. It’s like achieving an economy of time and effort, but not to be confused with laziness. Multi-tasking success initially requires organization and thought, but will later become habit. On to an example…

I was just thinking to myself that when I move to Toronto later this year, I plan to start going to repertory cinema and non-mainstream theatre again, as well as take up photography, volunteer at the opera and a soul kitchen, etc. But I currently do contract work all week long, day and night. I haven’t learned economy of effort. How can I possibly find the time? Not to mention, to even do laundry, I’ll probably have to either hop on a streetcar or walk to the nearest laundromat.

The frugal person in me suddenly put two concepts together:

• constrain yourself
• take photos in the street

The Headrush weblog says that if you want to create something amazing right now, you need to constrain yourself. I know from my nature as a perfectionist that I often spend more time than necessary on a project. It’s why my contract work takes about twice as long as it probably should.

So I sat down, sharpened my project management skills, and figured out how I could juggle my daily and weekly projects. Surprise, surprise, it worked. Well, sort of. Instead of spending 85+ hours per week, I calculated that I could possibly do the same amount work in only 55, give or take. That’s because, if divide each large task into smaller tasks and alternate them with the daily work, I won’t spend so much time on them. (That is, I won’t waste those hours staring at something when I could work on something else and come back to a problem.)

For example, say I have 3 recurring weekly tasks that take 15-20 hours each right now, due to doing each in a mammoth work session that isn’t always productive. Splitting each into a group of small tasks of 1-3 hours lets me cut out unproductive time. Attention span only goes so far, and interleaving different tasks will force me to stay on schedule.

I use Google Calendar, which lets me schedule my tasks, It uses an annoying popup reminder set a few minutes before a scheduled new task. This is effective if I don’t ignore it. I find that list tools like Neptune are helpful but don’t keep me to a schedule as much as annoying popup reminders.

As a result of this form of multi-tasking (doing several projects at once), I’d not only be able to complete all of my contracts and earn more money each month, but I’d have time left to do my own writing and projects. I could even take up photography again, etc., when I move. (Now, if still want to be frugal, I could always do some street photography while my laundry is being done, and then leverage that effort by doing a bit of blogging about photography.)

I’ve only been applying this new work methodology as of last night, but it appears that it’s effective, and I’m already getting more work done. Discipline in sticking to this multitasking method is the part I still have to conquer.

This post is about personal productivity and harnessing the creative, physical, and emotional cycles we all supposedly have called biorhythms. While my example is for blogging, the tips here apply to pretty much any endeavour. [This post was orignally written in early Dec/06 but not posted until Jan/07.]

I’ve been running a cool little WordPress plugin, SparkStats, on my private article bank website. The blog is on a subdomain that’s running WordPress 2.0x and is a password-protected storehouse for all articles that I’ve written for clients. It originally included some of my own blogs’ articles, but hasn’t for a few months. The reason I’m running SparkStats is to show myself my writing productivity. The plugin displays a little bar graph showing relative number of posts per day for the past 30 or so days.

Now that I’ve stopped faking the the post times (purely for aesthetic record-keeping reasons), and have let weekday posts slide into the weekend, I’m noticing a very interesting phenomenon that supports the concept of biorhythms or individual cycles of creativity, emotion, physical strength, etc. While I have a particular daily quota of posts that I “must” write for clients, I have been slipping a bit in the past few weeks – something that unfortunately happens to me in October-February, as part of SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder), also called the screaming blue meanies by some of us Canucks (Canadians).

As the image somewhere above shows, what I’m seeing, under natural posting conditions, is that the graph of my daily posting is nearly undulating on a sine curve basis, as is typical for biorhythms. That is, under natural conditions, if you only wrote and posted whatever you could handle each day, without forcing things, you’d probably see consistent up and down sine curves.

So then how do you handle problogging? I’ll tell you right off that for me, writing is a lot harder to do as a day-to-day career than computer programming. The latter I’ve done for nearly 30 years. While I’ve been writing (at least technical manuals) for over 20, I’ve never done day-to-day as a freelance career where creativity has to be available on demand. Entertaining, informative writing is not as formulaic as a piece of code that harnesses a database and specific data structures.

It’s especially not easy. Writing as a career takes discipline. One way around the cycles is to harness your cycles. Write extra “evergreen” posts when you’re at a creative and/or emotional high. Write news-y summary posts on the day of events. There are three biorhythm cycles, so strength might factor in as well. At my best, I’ve hit 100+ posts (including my e-paintings) in a week and believe that when I become a more efficient blogger, I can exceed that. (But my best months for writing are usually June-August, and sometimes January. That’s not to say I can’t produce in other months, but these are my most productive.)

Another method, if appropriate, is to change your blogging style. The truth is, most of my blogging “clients” run summary sites. But I try to add as much value as I can to what I write, usually by writing about a product or service in my own words, then hyperlinking to 2-4 articles. I also write the occasional fully original piece, often a case study, as well as some commentary articles.

Balance is the key to utilizing your creative cycles. Using a variety of post types allows you to pick, during productive down times, the ones that are easiest for you at the time, without surprising the readers. If you just find it within you to write on a given day, try some mindmapping or photography, both of which may spark your visual creativity.

These tips also apply to any type of research, writing or creative work. If you are someone that works with visual media, say photographs or paintings, try changing what you are doing – maybe try writing for a while. Harnessing your biocycles effectively means getting what you can done, and postponing what you cannot, until you can spark some inspiration.

There are so many theories and claims out there about the human ability to multi-task or not, and I thought I’d put my thoughts out there. I’ve been a multi-tasker for at least 20 years, if not longer. Though there’s a right way to go about it, and it requires both organization and discipline. I have loads of the former but I struggle with the latter.

Instead of babbling theoretically, let me give you a concrete example. (My posts tend to be long and detailed, but I’ll try to be brief this time.) As of this month, if I can manage the workload, I know have enough writing/ blogging contracts to consider myself a full-time professional freelance writer and blogger. My own sites’ revenue is tiny, but that’s another story. Here’s the breakdown of my workload, in general terms:

• 13 blog posts daily for 5 blogs (shrunk from 7), on weekdays. [Though I I actually post them any day of the week that's suitable.]

• 1-3 large articles weekly. Fixed deadlines, research- intensive, potentially-stressful work because there’s a lot at stake. Retainer work for the foreseeable future.

My work is anonymous, so I’m not giving example links. If you know me, you already know where to find me. But let’s start with the blog posts. I’m now focusing on two topics, shrunk down last month from three. I needed to revise my daily writing focus because for every topic I wrote about, I had to do a minimum amount of reading/ scanning everyday, including weekends, just to keep up. Now, with two topics only, my aim is laser-focused.

The fact is, I can spend, say, 2 hours each day reading one topic and 1 hr for the other one. It usually ends up being an average of 4 hrs/day total because I cross- pollinate my interests by reading other blogs that are related to my topics but not focused.

Regardless, for the amount of reading I do, I can write one post or I can write ten for that reading session. I try to read the night before, write a bit of possible, then continue reading in the morning. Post ideas have usually brewed in my head overnight. While some people might call that “sleeping on it”, it’s actually a form of multi-tasking that takes very little effort. When I don’t do any reading the night before, the next day’s writing usually is very functional and technical, not as entertaining. [Though that's not to say every post has to be entertaining.]

And then there are the weekly articles I write. While they don’t pay as much as a print article might for the same amount of output, they still pay well. What’s more, I’m on retainer with them. For the foreseeable future, I have at least 2 every week. That means guaranteed income and some peace of mind as a freelancer. (Despite the stress of the actual work.)

The problem is that they are research-intensive, with topics that are sometimes new to me. If I don’t plan well, I sometimes end up working for $6/hr or less. On the other hand, if I apply multi-tasking at its best, I could make $30/hr on some (not all) of these articles.

So what do I need to do to maximize my hourly earnings potential? Answer: multi-task properly. What does this entail? Here is a short task list of my methodology:

• Day 1:

• Scope out the problem. Understand what the client needs.

• Write up my genral task list for a given article. I apply project management principles here, which I was partly trained in back in the corporate world in the late 1990s.

• Build a mindmap of all the elements of the project that I’ll need to address, including each section to be written and references I need to read and link to.

• Take a short break, maybe work on something else.

• Spend one hour scanning (not reading) some of the references I’ve been given, as well as building up a list of additional references.

• My mind has had at least an overnight period to absorb what needs to be done, in general. I may not yet have an “angle” for the article. However, I go the metaphysical route with this, due to long experience in writing, and let the angle present itself to me. I never force it. But if I don’t do Day 1’s scoping immediately, I cannot meet my tight deadlines of 7 days or less for each weekly article. If I have details 3 weeks beforehand, then I start scoping then.

• Spend an hour or two browsing and/or reading a few references from my list, just to be sure to prep my mind for acquiring knowledge about the topic.
• Cull the reference list, if possible.

• Depending on when I had details of an assignment, it may be weeks or up to two months before I actually start on a particular article. I have some articles that I’ve set researchers to working on for me three months ahead of time.

• In the meantime, multi-tasking has kicked in. While I’ve been working on other articles and on the blogs, the “background processes” in my mind have been quietly flagging any information I come upon in relation to the project at hand.

• So when I actually reading and making notes, I often find that each section of the article “writes itself” in my head, and I merely have to type it out, then add hyperlinks to supporting references.

• This is what I mean by multi-tasking. Let the background processes in your head work for you by feeding them info early. Now move on to other work in the meantime.
• However, if the article has not yet formed in my head by Day R1, I start reading indepth, taking notes, etc.
• I then write up a draft and let it “sit” overnight.
• This is followed up by an edit to both tighten the writing, add any unlinked references, and get the word count right.

Now, I’ve given “blogging” as an application of this form of multi-tasking. However, you can apply similar methods for any discipline where you have to juggle a lot of tasks that require a great deal of thought and/or research. I use a combination of mindmapping, learning methods, and project management (PM) because it works for me. Without the PM, I’d be a basket case, due to my workload.

The success of my version of multi-tasking for writing is faith- based. I stumbled upon this technique over the years, and it never fails me. Provided I actually trust it and have the discipline to use it. And that’s the hardest part for me.

So, anyone who wants to write online for a living thus has a greater opportunity if they were to learn any or all of the top three languages. At least, that’s my hypothesis.

If you’re reading this, then you already know English. Let’s assume that you are English-speaking. So, what about learning Japanese or Chinese, then?

I’m leaving my own linguistic history out, because no matter how I try, it’s too verbose. Suffice it to say that while I’m not fluently multilingual, I do know at least smidgens of seven languages including English, French, Japanese, and my mother tongue, and the letterforms of at least 22 languages.

I believe it’s a good thing to be bilingual/ multilingual, and gives you an advantage in life. If you know how to use it. That goes against the grain for a lot of xenophobic people, but too bad. We are becoming a global village, with not just the websites on the Internet, but also the ability to make free long-distance “phone” calls using the Internet, as well as all the social networks and the ability to chat.

So, if you are tempted to learn one of the top three languages (in terms of Internet content) that you don’t already know, I’ll suggest Japanese. It’s far far easier than Chinese (Mandarin). Believe me, I tried the latter because I was considering going to China to teach English. It’s not a requirement, but I’m a lover of languages and considered it an opportunity. But with up to eleven different tonal inflections for any given syllable, it’s not an easy language for English speakers to learn.

By contrast, Japanese is very phonetic. Despite the fact that there are four alphabets/ written forms in use, you can use Romaji for most Japanese words. Romaji is simply the same Roman letters that are used for English and loads of other languages. Fortunately, there is one sound associated to each unique combination of Romaji letters, so it’s even relatively easy to read. What’s hard for some people is the proper pronunciation of Japanese words.

Still, you should start off with just audio lessons. Humans learn a language from childhood by listening first, then going to school to learn the written forms. So I’ve always found it stupid that anyone bothers to teach the written form of another language first, before teaching the aural form.

Now, with multitudes of websites that offer free podcast lessons, and sometimes written notes in PDF format, the only excuse you have for not learning a language you’re interested in is… Well, you’ll have to answer that for yourself.

One great resource is Libsyn, which is a podcast directory. In the past week, I’ve downloaded audio lessons (MP3 or related formats) for Japanese, Italian, and French (I’m rusty on all of them).

While all you really is a copy of the free Apple iTunes software, for audio/ video playback, it doesn’t hurt to have an audio player such as an iPod. Because of the battery duration on an iPod, I’ve been refreshing my Japanese by osmosis, going to sleep with the lessons running. It saves me time by not having to listen to them while I’m awake. And oddly enough, during the day, I’ll “hear” a Japanese word in my head out of nowhere, in review of what I’ve already listened to overnight.

I guess it doesn’t hurt that somewhere in the creaky depths of my mind, I already know several hundred words of Japanese. (I taught myself so that I could interview the lead singer of the fun, sweet Japanese “girl rock” band Shonen Knife. But that’s a story for another time.)

I’ve only listened to the first 20 lessons, but I’m very impressed with JapanesePod101.com. And the fact that the lessons are free doesn’t hurt either.

And if you’re wondering why I haven’t downloaded any Chinese lessons, it’s merely because I don’t have the time to look for podcasts. Really. It’s not because I’m scared. Honest.

If you’re earning residual revenue that pays out even if you are not doing anything, then it’s doubly important. The more you’re earning, obviously, the more important it is that either trusted friends or family have a list of your web properties and your passwords.

What’s the best way to handle this? Obviously, it’ll be different for everyone. You can always print this information and provide it in a sealed envelope to a family member who is web-savvy. Or put it in a safe deposit box as part of your assets, to be passed down as dictated in your will.

In my case, my brother has registered all of my web domains and hosting plans, so he knows what I have, as well as all of my site passwords – excluding some emails, Wordpress/ Typepad/ Movable Type/ Blogger accounts and any web services accounts. While I do have a file with all this information, he wouldn’t know where to look for it.

I don’t yet make enough residual income for it to matter. However, I currently write for pay for several websites/ weblogs. If something happens to me, knock wood, my instructions should be for my brother to send out emails. Or at the very least, announce it at Performancing.com.

If you think I’m being morbid or extreme, consider a blogger’s recent post about losing his friend, and how her parents do not know how to access her Yahoo email. (The page is no longer live, so I haven’t provided a link.)

My condolences, A.

I always try to write directly to that one hypothetical person, who may eventually bring back like-minded friends. If I haven’t got that loving feeling, I’ll leave an article for later – sometimes for months. If I don’t get that feeling within four or five months, I usually delete the article and have faith that my subconscious will come up with new topics for me to write about.

But that mental smile is crucial to developing a steady base of readers. Brian Clark has it. So do Liz Strauss, Yaro Starak, Om Malik, and several others – albeit, some are a bit more reserved about it. (Just examples; no ass-kissing going on here In the same way that people on the other end of a phone can feel you smiling, readers can feel whether or not you cared about writing an article. They may not realize it consciously, but if your writing is hollow, they won’t come back, no matter how important your topic is to them.

While I’ve known the smile-on-the-phone thing for years, I never consciously thought about the analog advice for writing until more recently. I’d noticed in June that one of my weblogs was getting small but steady daily traffic that was growing gradually (and still going). Much reflection finally led me to the conclusion that despite the infrequent posting, that weblog seemed to have the most warmth about the writing – that feeling of, hey, here’s something you might like to know – compared to most of the rest of my weblogs.

Other writers who smile when they write:

• Write Happy
• Speaker Sue
• Coincide Publishing

Let’s face it. Contextual advertising is generally tough to earn – or not, depending on who you ask. For me, it’s tough. I make more money writing for other people’s blogs. At least for now. But my website statistics suggest that I might someday make good money from my sites. If I can keep up the pace I’ve set for myself.

The keyword, though, is “someday”. There’s an exponential growth curve in blogging revenue, and some weblogs experience a shallower initial curve than others. Sure, there are people who experience faster growth and earn a living from contextual ad programs for AdSense – often spending less time than I. But I haven’t discovered the magic yet.

I have, however, discovered some other honest writing opportunities, courtesy of a website owner I’m collaborating with. He’s already started a successful online publishing business writing and selling targeted niche e-books and e-reports.

He wisely set up an affiliate program, whereby the affiliate takes 25%, he takes 25%, and the author takes 50%. He’s written two e-books himself, and my guess is that he has done quite well.

I am currently working with him on a series of e-reports, which require less of a commitment than a full book. I figure, one e-report should take me an elapsed time of about 20-40 hours, start to finish – including research, writing, editing and producing a reasonable layout before creating the PDF file. Let’s do some approximate calculations.

The e-books will sell for between US$17-47, depending on the content and the length. Even at $17, and because of the actual umbrella topic and its rising popularity, indications are that the e-publisher can sell up to 1000 copies in a year’s time. My 50% would then give me about $8500 for just one project. At 20-40 hours of work, that’s about $212-425/hr. Not bad. To achieve the same kind of earnings writing for a few dollars per post for some of the weblog networks, you’d have to write, well, a lot.

But of course, that’s a lie. To make an e-book/ e-report publishing venture work, you need a high-traffic site with a good conversion rate. To get that, you need to build trust and prove that your writing is worth buying. In my estimation, that means writing a weblog, with regular fresh entries containing valuable information. And that, of course, takes time for research, writing, and building up a regular readership.

Furthermore, I think the reason why this e-publisher’s site works is that the only advertising on his blog is an advert for his book. There are no other ads to distract the potential customer’s eye. This is the same technique that Seth Godin uses, and, I believe, the same one that Brian Clark of Copyblogger will use. All three of them are marketing geniuses, in that they realize that in addition to blogging, they need to give something of value away for free.

In fact, Seth Godin gives away many of his e-books for free, and makes his living from sales of print books and speaking engagements. Brian Clark hasn’t shown his pimp hand yet, but no doubt will do so soon. They are not the only two doing this, but if you want a career from writing online, you’d do well to read both their weblogs.

So, yeah, I think that you CAN make a profitable living from online writing, but not necessarily from contextual advertising. It’s a question of finding some popular topics and writing freshly about them in a weblog, and supplementing them with free e-books/ e-reports. When you’ve built up a sizeable readership, then consider offering an e-report for sale, to test the waters. You need to give the project enough time, to make sure that a sizable number of people (maybe 1,000?) have been exposed to it.

Unfortunately, this method means that you need to pay your bills by some other means, until your e-books (and others, if you’re planning to go that route) start selling. In other words, you might still have to write pay-per-posts for a while.

But while I’ve not disagreed with Brian to date, I don’t completely agree with the reasons he thinks these so-called paintings work. Either he’s being entirely too graceful, or he’s actually missed one main reason why they work. Or I got frustrated with the whole nonsense and skimmed over Brian’s articles instead of reading them thoroughly. And since I’m a more blunt person than he, I’m going to throw in my 2c. (And so you don’t get the wrong impression, I think Brian is a genius and a phenomenal writer. I may have missed something important.)

As he rightly says, it’s not the actual paintings themselves “that mean anything.” Sure they’re unique, but so is the furniture that a New York City artist made with his friends’ poo, frozen for texture. I’m not making that up. And they’re limited editions. So were Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup paintings, which still generate great debate to this day. And there’s the Canadian artist who painted three stripes of colour across a giant canvas and received millions for it. From the Canadian government, no less. But this latter example doesn’t actually fit in with the others.

Why not? Because what I get of the whole thing is that you only really have to find 1,000 interested people to make an online project successful. That’s if you are single entrepeneur as opposed to a company. There’s an old saying that if you want to be a millionaire, you can sell $1 items to a million people or a million dollar item to one person. You could also sell $1,000 items to 1,000 people.

But if you are just one person, say a blogger/ online writer, your overhead is not nearly as much as for a print publishing company. Think you could get by with $27,000/yr? That means selling $27 items to 1,000 people. Every year.

$27,000 doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you’re not commuting to work, you’re actually saving a great deal of money. And in the United States and Canada at least, you should be able to write off some or all of the expenses related to your online writing career.

Consider the alternate – or at least my alternate. On the very last computer contract I did before becoming a full-time starving writer, I calculated that including car payments, gasoline, toll road costs, and unavoidably expensive lunches, plus the necessity of working Saturdays, I actually spent close to $1200 every month getting to work.

That doesn’t include the outrageous amount of time I sat in traffic jams in the Greater Toronto Area. Some days, I spent an extra 2-3 hours just sitting and doing nothing except wishing I could work from home. That’s time I could have spent doing something more productive, may be a side business from home. But even just 5 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that an entrepreneur could make money on the Internet. Now I’m sure they can, if they approach is right.

Granted, I sometimes miss the whole working in an office thing, simply for social reasons, I don’t miss the traffic, the road rage, the fumes, the insane toll charges, and the politics. But after my sober reflection about my one-year blogiversary, I thought about some of the potential ways to actually earn a dollar writing online. I’ll reflect on them in the next post.

The secondary reason is that I focused on topics that are not particularly popular. I know that now. In fact, I’ve often ignored a lot of the technical topics I do know and gone the easy route by writing about topics I could do easily and quickly.

For example, after working in restaurants for the last four years to pay the bills while my writing career got off the ground, I could come up with recipes at the snap of a finger. In fact, early on in my problogging, my cooking blogs (4 archived, one active) initially earned me most of my daily Adsense ad revenue – as little as that was.

However, that’s not the case anymore as I’ve tried rectify my lack of focus by swinging back to technology, which I’ve been told I write about quite well. So I’ve picked more niche topics lately, and that has produced some higher per-ad-click earnings. The problem with niche topics, however, is that even though there are not many competing websites/ weblogs, there also not many readers.

So to rectify that, I’ve started writing more general articles about these new technologies for a website (owned by someone else) that gets high traffic. The result is that several of my articles have been bookmarked simultaneously by multiple social bookmarking sites such as the well-known Digg, but also numerous sites that I had not previously heard of.

The bulk of my first several articles received 300-1000 pageviews each, in a single day. This is something that none of the articles on my own sites have ever achieved – not even in total, over a year’s time.

The downside is that each article’s popularity seems to be short-lived. My intent was to create general articles about new technology, in hopes of creating a new audience. No success to date, but it’s still early yet.

But back to my own weblogs. There are other reasons my websites have not yet become successful, and I’m still learning them. I’ll reveal them when I learn what they are. There are a lot of factors that have to be executed simultaneously, and it’s hard to do when you’re not just writing for multiple sites but managing the analysis of them as well.

On the plus side, however, several positive things have happened. I’m constantly learning how to be an efficient writer – a necessity considering that I’m writing for my own blogs plus six others on request, with a few more possibly to come.

As a result of wriing as much as I do, my blog writing has improved. It’s not the same as writing for print. You are writing for both human readers as well as for the search engines. There are factors such as “organic SEO”, which helps ensure that you rank high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This is an art in itself, and despite having once been the webmaster of one of the very first search engines on the Internet, it’s a whole different game these days. You learn as you go along, make loads of mistakes, and keep trying. If you don’t keep trying, you give up. Which I have no plans to do anytime soon.