Tag Archives: planning

Talking tech: The publishing process – getting personal

In this month’s Talking tech column, Andy Coulson shares the systems he uses to keep on top of his editorial work, from scheduling projects and organising to-do lists to tracking client and author queries.

This month’s theme for The Edit is ‘the publishing process’. Whenever I see the word ‘process’ I think of workflows and project management, which brings me to collaboration and communication. These are things that technology can be really helpful for (or completely sabotage).

We all need to manage a range of workflows with different clients and types of job, but these all have common elements. The ones that come to mind are managing workload; tracking work; and dealing with issues and communicating those to clients. We all need good systems to handle these and arguably our effectiveness as freelancers is down to how good these functions are. I’m going to give you a guided tour of my own system as a way of illustrating where technology helps with this and where it hinders.

I’ve got here by a process of evolution so I strongly recommend that whatever you do, you review it from time to time and be prepared to change it. My aim with these systems is to give myself clear visibility of my availability; to have a good understanding of the steps to complete a task, and where I am with those; to collect queries, manage circulating those and make sure I deal with the feedback; and to plan my working day around work and life commitments.

Availability: Can I fit this job in?

To keep track of my availability, typically over the next six months, I use Google Calendar. Everything gets chucked in here – holidays, dental appointments, possible jobs etc. I use different calendars for work and family stuff, and different colours for each. If you need some help in how to do this, this article covers Google Calendar and this one covers iCal on a Mac.

When I agree a potential job, I create a new calendar entry covering the expected dates. In the title I include the client contact details, which means I can easily find the original email if I need to contact them. The other thing I usually do is change the colour for the task. These colours relate to customers and are consistent with the colours I use in Toggl to track time.

Now I can use the calendar to see what I have on and what I have coming up. This lets me respond quickly to enquiries and changes in schedules, and also means I can confidently plan other areas of my life around work commitments. I know when I’ve got a busy week coming up, so don’t try and fit in a dental appointment.

Here I think a technological solution works really well. The multiple colours help me take in a range of information quickly. The multiple calendars allow me to filter information.

Diary: organising the publishing process

Planning: How do I do the job?

Once a job goes live, I start looking at it in a bit more detail. Generally, I need to break it down into manageable steps I can then track. This lets me see progress, which is good for my stress levels (usually), and means I can keep the client updated. The other benefit to this is that I can use my time flexibly as I can have a much more granular view of how long things are taking.

I use a to-do-list manager, as I tend to think in lists, but there are any number of other tools you could use to organise these tasks, such as board or card-based tools like Trello. My favourite is Todoist, which is available on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. I like it because it lets me organise things in projects and tasks that I can split into smaller elements. I can add reminders and various flags and labels that let me sort and organise tasks.

I tend to keep some projects that I can dump one-off tasks in, which are often non-work related. For example, I have a ‘maintenance tasks’ project that all the jobs that need doing around the others get put in. I also have a ‘personal tasks’ project that can contain recurring tasks, like reminding me to check if I need to collect my son from school.

Each task within a larger job gets its own project. I can add project-specific details in the description, and add to these through comments as the job goes on. I split a job into tasks (where it’s relevant) and may even have sub-tasks if it proves necessary. The sub-tasks can be a good way of keeping track of things that are part completed, so if you have a chapter 3 edit task and you are waiting on queries you could create a sub-task of ‘deal with Ch3 queries’ before moving on to the next chapter.

Todoist is where I keep track of everything rather than keeping it inside my head. I think a technological solution here is really good. At this level of task management you get a lot of change, and have to manage lots of odds and ends of information.

One other advantage of using Todoist is it allows me to get information out of email. Email is a brilliant tool, but is utterly useless for storing information, and has a tendency to then create distractions from what you need to do. (Cal Newport’s A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload is an interesting exploration of this.) Even with the search capabilities of modern systems it is cumbersome to try to track bits of information in email. It is far better to add key information to the project in your task manager.

Organising the day-to-day

Here’s where technology and I part company. To plan my day, I use a pen and paper and do something called time-blocking. I have a square-gridded notepad and keep a weekly calendar with each day divided into hours. I then mark in my wife’s work commitments and any other fixed commitments that need working around. I can then plan in what I am going to do and when, drawn from the tasks in Todoist. I also include things like any plans to exercise, so there is a greater chance of me actually doing those. I do most of this in pencil so I can change the plan if things overrun or need to be moved. I tend to plan the next day at the end of each working day.

Taking time to do this on paper means I spend a little more time thinking about what I am going to do. This (hopefully) means I am being a bit more intentional about what I am choosing to do and reminds me it is all a choice, which helps to stop me stressing about things.

Office stationery: organising the publishing process

Keeping track of queries

Going back to the theme of not storing things in email, I’ve changed how I handle queries. Keeping track of queries is a really important task, especially on bigger jobs. I can’t begin to quantify the amount of time that I’ve wasted trying to find a project management tool that would handle all the things mentioned above and help manage queries, but I can’t find one that suits me.

My solution came out of a conversation on the forums about this. Abi Saffrey suggested using conditional formatting in Excel for ‘at-a-glance’ status on queries. For each job I have a queries spreadsheet with columns for the location of the query (I split this into file name, page/folio number and location description on the page so I can search for all the queries on a particular file), who it is for, status, date sent, date received, details of the query and the reply. The status column uses a list to select the status: draft, sent, received, re-queried, done. These have different colours, set by conditional formatting.

When I send out queries it doesn’t matter whether I send the Excel file, copy a couple of quick queries into an email, or share the Excel file on OneDrive, there is always one master copy of the Excel sheet that I keep updated with statuses and replies (copied from email if needed).

Bringing it all together

As I mentioned, I’ve never found the perfect tool to do it all; consequently, I use several tools that I’ve found I can make play nicely together with minimum effort. In addition to these I also use Toggl to track time and Quickfile to handle billing, invoices and accounting.

I think the trick with systems is to invest some time in thinking about what problems you want any system to solve. In this way you can research tools and decide what compromises and tweaks you can make. Hopefully this then means you end up with a system that works for you, rather than one you are trying to fit into.

About Andy Coulson

Andy CoulsonAndy Coulson is a reformed engineer and primary teacher, and a Professional Member of the CIEP. He is a copyeditor and proofreader specialising in STEM subjects and odd formats like LaTeX.

 

 

About the CIEP

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) is a non-profit body promoting excellence in English language editing. We set and demonstrate editorial standards, and we are a community, training hub and support network for editorial professionals – the people who work to make text accurate, clear and fit for purpose.

Find out more about:

 

Photo credits: header image by Tara Winstead on Pexels, diary by JESHOOTS.COM on Pexels, office stationery by Alex McCarthy on Pexels.

Posted by Belinda Hodder, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Flying solo: Time management for yourself and for your business. Part I: Diagnosis

In this two-part article, Sue Littleford takes a fresh look at time management. She starts by covering the diagnosis – how much time you actually have – then goes on to examine what can go wrong with time management, and how to counter this.

For freelancers, without the discipline of a line manager breathing down your neck and looking over your shoulder at what’s on your screen, without the structure of fixed working hours, time-management skills can get a bit flabby.

Time management boils down to three main elements: knowing how much time you have; knowing how much time you need; and not messing things up. In this article, we’ll take a look at the first two, and in a separate article, we’ll run through the not-messing-things-up aspect (this turned out to be a subject on which I had a lot to say!)

Knowing how much time you have

Take a good hard look at your week. How much time is available to work? How much time – and when – does your family need? How much time – and when – do other commitments take? How much time do you need for the essentials – eating, sleeping, household tasks? How much downtime do you need? Pro tip: do not skimp on sleeping time or relaxation time.

How about your month? Your year? Figure out how much time is available for work. That may vary from day to day, from week to week, as other commitments and wishes take priority. But come up with a basic work diary that will show you your work time, and block out the time you need for everything else. If you have holidays in mind, into the diary they go.

Researchers have figured out that five hours per day of intensive work is all you’re going to do, healthily, if you want to have a long-term career without burnout.

Do you use the popular Pomodoro technique of 25 minutes’ work then a 5-minute break? I don’t. The brain starts to lose concentration after around 45 minutes. But did you know it takes more than 20 minutes to get back into a deep-work state?

Those two figures together mean I’m not a fan of Pomodoro. Editorial work is deep work, and breaking off halfway through my capacity to concentrate, only to take most of the next work period to get back into the flow, is anything but helpful for time management. I’ve found I come up for air at around 50–65 minutes, so that’s when I take a break. I get much more work done than when I was trying to work to the Pomodoro timings.

In an ideal world, you’d arrange your work to suit your personal rhythm – are you a morning person or an evening one? It’s useful to know when you find it easiest to concentrate and work efficiently and effectively, but in some people’s lives, that’s a luxury for some future year.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World is an excellent read for people doing editorial work.

Taking holidays: Respecting yourself

Time management: beach holiday

When you think of scheduling time off, what barriers do you put up? That clients will never approach you again if you’re away when they contact you? (Answer: let clients likely to contact you know you’re going to be away from your desk. One person I spoke to about this suggested putting your holiday dates in your email signature – neat. And learn how to turn on your out-of-office autoresponder for your email. Clients take holidays themselves: they’ll understand.)

Or do you have FOMO – fear of missing out – on a plum job?

Or perhaps you feel you can’t afford it. That’s more likely in the early years when you’re building up your business – especially if you’re the only or principal breadwinner. If you’re not at work, you’re not earning. That’s an argument for ensuring your fee rates cover not-work time as well as all your other overheads, something I wrote about on my own blog (the key bit is towards the end of the article).

It’s sage advice to add to your cushion of cash whenever you can – a counsel of perfection, I know, but one worth aiming for. Part of that cushion is for non-working times, whether that’s voluntary holidays, work famines or some other rainy-day need.

If you fail to take holidays because the client always comes first, then it’s time to set yourself some personal boundaries, and learn to respect yourself, and them. It’s far healthier, mentally and physically.

People who don’t have partners or children at home probably find it easier to cave in and fill a holiday week with work than those who have given commitments to other people. If this is you, is there someone you could give an equivalent commitment to? If you’re not going away, then perhaps you could book in some activities or trips with a friend?

Knowing how much time you need

Now you know how much time you have for work, how much work can you take on to fill that time? It bears repeating – do not plan to work 100% of your available time. You’ll need a buffer for the unexpected. If you are fully committed, every moment of your waking life, where’s your capacity to cope if something happens off-schedule? If you catch a bad cold, let alone anything more time-consuming?

If you’re worried about having gaps in your diary, know that you can fill them with marketing, with training or continual professional development, with reviewing your processes – all things that contribute to your business, but that are less riveted to the spot in terms of deadlines. It also leaves you the capacity perhaps to say yes to an unexpected job offer if you want to.

Know your work speed if you want to schedule jobs accurately

I started keeping stats on my work throughput as part of my invoicing system when I started freelance editing in 2007. I’ve made various improvements since then, and you’ve seen the result in the Going Solo toolkit’s business records.

After years of data collection, I know how fast I usually work on different kinds of material, what my slowest is, what my fastest is, how work from repeat clients is likely to absorb my time – all kinds of essential information.

I have, essentially, a database to compare new jobs to, which will tell me how much time I’m likely to need (and then I add wiggle room). But from the moment you record your first job, you’re on your way to building up your own database, which will just get more and more useful.

Without information on how long things take, you can’t schedule work with confidence, because you’re basically guessing.

Now you know how much time you have available, and how long various kinds of work take. If you’ve taken my advice, you’re not trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot (a litre into a half-litre pot doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?).

Planning a timetable

Time management: diary and pencil

Rough out a timetable with milestones, so you know how far through the job you need to be every two or three days. It will help you work out whether the deadline is feasible, and it will draw some lines in the sand so you’ll know if you start to lag behind.

For books, I do this by printing out the contents page, and noting how many pages in each chapter, then use my knowledge of my work speed to figure out how long each chapter will take me. Then I assign each chapter to a day, or two days, depending on length and complexity.

For articles and other short pieces of writing, this isn’t nearly so complicated, but if you’re doing a lot on a fast turnaround, treat each piece as part of a larger whole – do you have to finish three today and three by the end of the week? There’ll be some kind of expectation, so jot it down so you know that you’ve done enough for today, or that you need to make an earlier start tomorrow.

There’s no need to draw up fancy charts, which themselves are time-consuming to produce. But do remember to fit your timetable around your other commitments – it has to be realistic (and include some wiggle room, of course).

Ready to read Part II of this article?

Over to you

What time-management ploys have worked for you? Tell us in the comments!

About Sue Littleford

Sue Littleford is the author of the CIEP guide Going Solo, now in its second edition. She went solo with her own freelance copyediting business, Apt Words, in March 2007 and specialises in scholarly humanities and social sciences.

 

About the CIEP

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) is a non-profit body promoting excellence in English language editing. We set and demonstrate editorial standards, and we are a community, training hub and support network for editorial professionals – the people who work to make text accurate, clear and fit for purpose.

Find out more about:

 

Photo credits: header image by Agê Barros, beach holiday by S’well, diary by Jeshoots, all on Unsplash.

Posted by Belinda Hodder, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Flying solo: How can we apply our editorial judgement to our businesses?

In her regular Flying solo column, Sue Littleford considers how the critical skill of editorial judgement can be applied to running an editorial business.

Editorial judgement calls for an understanding of context, for knowing your stuff when it comes to technical matters (whether that’s the finer points of grammar or the finer points of Word or the finer points of inorganic chemistry, if that’s your niche), for knowing when to press ahead and when to leave well alone, and for knowing what resources you need and how to use them.

Each of these skills can also be applied to the way you run your business.

Understanding context

Marketing works best when you know who you’re marketing to. Who do you work for? Who do you want to work for? Who’s your ideal client, and what’s your ideal subject matter, your ideal content, your ideal everything?

Just as in copyediting and in proofreading, you can’t make good decisions until you understand the context.

If you have a marketing budget – and that is a time budget, every bit as much as a cash one – then you want to spend it wisely.

What will give you, to coin a phrase, the biggest bang for your buck? Or your hour?

Where do the clients you want to work with hang out? I closed my Facebook business page. No, don’t squeal in horror! My clients aren’t there – in terms of social media and looking to hire, they’re over on LinkedIn, which is where I’ve placed my focus. I’m not wasting my time updating content for people who aren’t there to read it.

Most of my clients come via my CIEP Directory entry, which I had just updated before drafting a bit more of this post. It’s a worthwhile investment of my time to keep my Directory entry fresh – that’s the context in which my ideal clients are most likely to find me.

Technical matters

The business equivalent of knowing your subjunctive from your style palette is fairly wide-ranging.

Do you understand the laws under which your business operates? Do you have all the necessary licences and permissions? UK residents have a fairly easy ride, it always seems to me, when registering as self-employed. I hear much more complicated stories from people trading in other countries. You need to be on top of these technical issues.

Are you au fait with taxation rules? Are you attending HM Revenue and Customs’ live or recorded webinars on allowable business expenses, record keeping and completing your self-assessment return?

Are you budgeting for the Health and Social Care levy payable from April 2022 being added to Class 4 National Insurance contributions (and then as a separate tax from April 2023)?

If you’re not in the UK, are you doing something similar in your own jurisdiction, ensuring you’re up to speed with the latest tax changes that affect you?

Are you reading up on and generally getting ready for Making Tax Digital (MTD) in April 2024 (again, UK folks only)? Have you started investigating the app you’ll need to use to make your returns?

How about your contracts and your terms and conditions? Fit for purpose? Compliant with the law of your land?

Are you on top of IT security – firewalls, anti-malware programs, back-ups?

What about banking? Do you operate somewhere a separate business account is mandatory? (It’s not a requirement in the UK, for instance, but it is in some countries.) Would a separate business account, even if you’re in the UK, make sense in your circumstances?

Judging what action to take

Now you’ve layered up these transferable skills, you understand the context you want to work within and you know where you want to steer your business. It’s time to exercise more judgement in deciding what action you need to take.

Just as you take an overview of an editorial job, and use the brief and your own technical expertise to decide how to tackle each specific piece of work, apply that same thought process to the wider scale of your business.

Do you need a website? Or a better one?

Should you start a blog? Or should you revive or close down a neglected one?

How will you use social media to market yourself? Which platforms will repay your investment of time? Do you need to remove yourself from any that aren’t repaying your time, or try new ones?

Speaking of time, how should you schedule yours? How many hours a day do you want to work? What steps do you need to bring your current hours up or down to that level? Do you need more clients, or just better-paying work? How will you get from where you are to where you want to be?

How does your work fit around your home life? It’s been especially tricky for so many people in times of Covid, and often difficult adjustments have been made in so many households. Have you found the sweet spot yet? What further adjustments would help? Is any untapped support available, or do you just have to endure for a while longer?

Keep your eyes on the prize – you’re thinking now at whole-business level, not just the piece of work in front of you on your desk.

What about a business retreat? Can you either get away by yourself for a couple of days, or with one or two trusted friends who need to do some in-depth thinking about their big pictures too?

If you need to stay at home, can you schedule a couple of days with your email and phone off? Give yourself breathing space in which to lift your eyes up to the horizon and take the long view of where you want to be headed.

From your musings, you will return to your quotidian world with action plans for each area of your business that was under consideration this time.

Maybe you should concentrate your business retreat on just one area. I know I need to be better prepared for disaster recovery, for instance, and I need to give some serious thinking and investigation time to it.

Judging what action not to take

But, just as in editing and proofreading, you also need to know when to leave something untouched – it might not be perfect, but it’s certainly good enough. Don’t pressurise yourself to write action plans to overhaul parts of your business that are working well enough.

Again, just as in editing and proofreading, you also need to think about the brief – the framework you’re operating in – and budgetary constraints. Perfection is a ridiculous and pointless goal. Good enough within the circumstances is what we’re aiming for.

Time spent running your business is an overhead that facilitates earning money, but it is not time spent actually earning it. So keep your action plans modest. No counsels of perfection. No eye-wateringly demanding roadmaps to some unachievable Utopia.

Take simple steps (if they’re not simple, you’ve not broken them down enough) that will either repay the investment now, or lay the groundwork for part of a larger strategy. Just keep it moving forward. Think in terms of the tortoise and the hare, if the tortoise could occasionally break into a trot.

Does each step take you closer to the goal? Or are you doing things that are unnecessary, and no one is paying you for? You try to avoid that when you’re working with text. Apply the same judgement to your business.

Good enough is good enough.

Notepad with a to do list

What about resources?

Now you’ve worked out which actions you need to take, and which you can delay or completely forget about, what do you need to help you along?

How will you make your plans practical?

Do you know where to find business support (in the UK, try Small Business Britain or IPSE) or guidance on getting along with HMRC? How about guidance for MTD preparation?

Would you benefit from advice on IT security? Or on contracts?

If you’re a member of the CIEP at one of the professional grades, did you know you can get some free legal advice? (Log in to the CIEP website, go to the members’ area, then Benefits and scroll down to the last block of info.)

Are you aware of all the member benefits the CIEP offers? It’s a growing list! Are you signed up to and do you use the forums? They’re one of the best benefits – places to ask questions and offer answers to others, and take part in discussions that may well broaden your scope. Even if you only join the forums to lurk – to read without posting – you’ll find a wealth of helpful and interesting material.

If you’re not a member, then take a look at the resources the CIEP offers to the public.

More prosaically, do you buy reference books on paper or use online versions? Style manuals, dictionaries, grammars, editorial textbooks, etc? Which is most cost-effective for you?

Have you checked you’re on the fastest broadband package you can afford from your supplier? If your connection is a bit unreliable, or slow, then you might feel it’s a sensible investment to have paper copies of certain reference works – perhaps in addition to online versions.

What about founding a mutual support group – people who can help out if you can’t work and need someone to complete the job? Could that group also be a mastermind or accountability group to support you in your business as well as your editing and proofreading?

The bottom line

You’ve spent a lot of time and effort – and money – in developing your skills as an editor and/or proofreader. You’ve undertaken training to learn your craft and how to apply editorial judgement as you work with the text.

Businesses don’t happen by accident – and they don’t stay viable by accident, for the most part.

The judgement you rely on when working with words is just as applicable to your business life. Make good use of it!

About Sue Littleford

Sue Littleford is the author of the CIEP guide Going Solo, now in its second edition. She went solo with her own freelance copyediting business, Apt Words, in March 2007 and specialises in scholarly humanities and social sciences.

 

 

About the CIEP

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) is a non-profit body promoting excellence in English language editing. We set and demonstrate editorial standards, and we are a community, training hub and support network for editorial professionals – the people who work to make text accurate, clear and fit for purpose.

Find out more about:

 

Photo credits: tortoise by Marzena7 on Pixaby, notebook by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels.

Posted by Harriet Power, CIEP information commissioning editor.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Don’t panic! How to stay calm in a crisis

By Melanie Thompson

Drawing of an 'emergency kit' bag with Hart's Rules and Oxford English Dictionary books spilling out of the top

Would you sign up for a two-hour conference session titled ‘Risk Assessment for Editors and Proofreaders’? Perhaps a few people would. (I might even be tempted myself, because I have some experience of editing and writing safety-related content.) But SfEP conferences always aimed to entertain as well as educate: after all, that’s one of the best ways to learn. So I needed to come up with a new twist on an apparently dull but important topic for my slot at the 2018 event.

After a bit of head scratching I came up with an idea: ‘Don’t Panic! How to stay calm in a crisis’ – a workshop that challenged my unsuspecting victims keen and willing editorial colleagues to play a giant interactive board game: The Game of Editorial Life.

Spinning plates

Freelance editorial professionals need to keep a lot of plates spinning – marketing their services, juggling client expectations and moving deadlines, chasing invoices, and keeping up to date with technology. And there are other plates spinning in the background – both business and personal – that must not be ignored.

Life happens and plates may crash but, by thinking ahead and preparing for the worst, we can avoid many problems, and survive most of the rest.

When I say ‘survive most of…’ I do mean just that. There is one inevitability that we all face (and I don’t mean your tax bill), and we need to think about that too.

The Game of Editorial Life enabled like-minded professionals to think about ways to plan ahead to avoid a number of work-related crises – from electricity outage to hacked computers via vanishing clients. But we also discussed strategies to deal with non-work events that can have an impact on our capacity to work and therefore pose a risk to business continuity.

Among those was one I want to focus on here: the round I named ‘Unhappy families’.

Unhappy families

Drawing of a person with a broken arm in a sling

If you are an employee you will have access to paid holiday, sick leave, maternity/paternity and other benefits. And there will usually be someone else on hand who can cover for you if you have to dash off because of a family emergency. This is relevant even if you don’t have a ‘family’ in the traditional sense – pets have crises too as, of course, do close friends. More important, you yourself may have a health crisis (either sudden in onset, or a gradual change that makes working difficult).

If you’re a freelancer, you have to grapple with these things while still keeping your work plates spinning.

Or do you?

In the workshop, I presented the competing teams – yes, it really was a game (with forfeits, and prizes) – with various scenarios and asked them to make a crisis plan by answering the following questions:

  • Triage – what do you do first, second …?
  • Do you tell your clients?
  • If so, when and how?
  • What could you do to be better prepared for this sort of crisis?

Grab a pen and some scrap paper and have a go yourself. Here are a couple of scenarios:

  1. You have landed a really exciting project, but a few days in you’re starting to feel really ill, with flu-like symptoms.
  2. You get a call one morning that a close family member/friend has been taken to hospital in an ambulance.

In the workshop discussion our ideas for all the scenarios coalesced around these key points:

  • Remember the flight attendant – put on your oxygen mask (ie, look after yourself so you can care for others).
  • Consider health/dental insurance.
  • Have regular health checks.
  • Regular breaks/holidays.
  • Consider loss of earnings insurance (it can be very expensive) – not to be confused with payment protection insurance (which often doesn’t work for the self-employed).
  • Know where to seek local help.
  • Tap into your network – local and remote (CIEP colleagues are perennially generous with their time and empathy).
  • Talk to your clients – they are humans.

Extras you might consider for scenarios 1 and 2 above are: get vaccinated; and keep emergency numbers handy.

A desktop PC with a unwell looking face on the monitor screen and smoke rising from the top

On that latter point, the entire workshop was built around developing an emergency plan and all the participants went home armed with a business resilience booklet that acts as an aide memoire for all the lively and useful discussions of the day, as well as a place to write down essential information that you – or your nearest and dearest – can easily find in a crisis.

I have mine pinned on my kitchen noticeboard.

As I mentioned at the beginning, crises don’t bother to phone you up and plug themselves into your busy schedule, they just happen. Mine, post-conference, was a call from a stranger to say that my son had crashed his car. I was in the middle of work for a client, and had an ill pet waiting to go for a walk. Of course, I dropped everything and dashed to the scene (son was fine, by the way) but I was very glad I had spent time while writing the workshop to think about my own ‘don’t panic’ strategy.

Remember:

  • Don’t leave things to chance.
  • Make plans.
  • Review them regularly (eg, once a year).

Further reading

 

Melanie Thompson reading the SfEP guide 'Pricing your project'Melanie Thompson (CIEP APM) has worked in and around publishing since 1988 and has just begun her 20th year as a freelancer. She writes and edits materials on sciences, especially climate change – a topic worth panicking about – from her home in a small village on the Herts/Beds/Bucks border. She’s an CIEP tutor. Follow her on Twitter via @EditorSpice

All illustrations © Paul Dyett 2018

 

Proofread by Joanne Heath, Entry-Level Member.
Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

 

Originally published April 2019; updated June 2021.

Who would contact your clients if you died?

By Luke Finley and Laura Ripper
This is a fully collaborative effort, but Laura did more of the research and organisation and Luke more of the writing up, so when ‘I’ is used it refers to Luke. Anything in quotes was contributed by others in one of the many discussions we started on this subject.

We’re all going to die!

That may not come as a surprise to many of us, but it’s not something we like to dwell on. That’s probably why the topic jumped off the page when I read the workshop handouts from the 2015 SfEP/Society of Indexers joint conference.1 I’m usually fairly organised, but here was a major piece of advance preparation that I’d never even considered.

Discussions online (including on the member forums: https://forums.sfep.org.uk/read.php?2,81561) led to an ever-growing list of considerations that many of us had avoided facing up to, but among the slightly sheepish admissions were a few impressive people with clear and practical plans in place.

Further research revealed a wide range of advice and online resources for putting together what one contributor dubbed DEATHnotes. We can’t hope to cover every aspect of this can of worms here, so we’ve gone for DEATHnotes for Dummies: a summary of the most pertinent questions and practical steps, with some pointers to further information and advice.

The ‘why’

If you haven’t made these kinds of plans yet, you might wonder how necessary it is. For most of us, our priority is how we want our grieving loved ones to deal with our mortal remains and share out our stuff. But if we don’t leave instructions about business matters, it’ll probably be the same grieving loved ones who have to deal with the fallout. Major tasks like informing a bank or mortgage provider may be on their radar already. But would they know, or think to ask about, who provides your web hosting or exactly which company you were actually working for when you said ‘I’m doing a copy-edit for Taylor & Francis’?

Then there’s the question of professionalism. Most of us work alone; there’s no colleague, line manager or admin support to pick up our unfinished tasks. Even if you’re so pragmatic and unsentimental that you’re not concerned about your own reputation after your demise, you could argue that the reputation of the wider profession (and the CIEP) is well served if it’s the norm to have contingency plans in place.

The ‘what’

Nominating a responsible person

Even if you’ve made plans, is a family member the best option? Leaving them with this task at a difficult time ‘might not be the kindest thing to do’. And ‘what happens if you’re in an accident together?’ Is your next of kin IT-literate? Do they understand your business processes in detail? As one person pointed out, ‘a fellow editor would be in a better position to help [my clients] by recommending someone to finish the work or pointing them towards the SfEP Directory’.

A trusted friend or colleague may be a fairer, more practical option. Many of us have working relationships with other editors, often working on similar types of material, who may be ideally placed to take over work or find someone else who can. If you don’t have a trusted friend or colleague, or don’t want to burden them, the site MyLawyer (https://www.mylawyer.co.uk/) suggests using an accountant. If you use one already, they’re likely to be familiar with your business.

The key thing is to identify someone. If you don’t, it may be left to the legal folk to figure out. They’ll do it slowly (no help to your current clients) and expensively.

Plan what information you need to pass on

As a minimum, this is likely to include:

  • Client contact details. Is it clear who your contact is within a firm?
  • Current and forthcoming projects. Is your record of these linked to contact details? Are regular clients included?
  • Passwords. It doesn’t matter how organised your records are if no one can get at them. Do you have a separate record of passwords and usernames for your PC, website, cloud storage, directories, email accounts, social media accounts and password-protected documents?
  • Advertising. Your SfEP Directory entry, entries in other directories, business Facebook page and other social media profiles could continue to bring new work in if they’re not taken down. Some sites have processes you can set up in advance: for example, see Facebook’s Legacy Contact options (under Security Settings) and Gmail’s Inactive Account Manager.
  • Detailed preferences. For example, what do you want to happen to your online presence? For many of us these days a large part of our lives is lived online. Simply having it all deleted might suit some people, but most people will have slightly more complex wishes than this.
  • Financial information. This includes outstanding invoices, payments received for work not yet done, and possibly money owed. A comprehensive spreadsheet storing this information alongside contact details and current projects is worth the effort. (There are some good templates online which you could adapt, such as Louise Harnby’s: http://www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com/blog-the-proofreaders-parlour/editorial-annual-accounts-template-excel.)
  • In what order? For example, you may not want clients to find out by reading a message on your website before they’ve been told personally.

Keeping it up to date

MyLawyer suggests reviewing the information you’ve prepared regularly, but this sounds like one of those chores that always gets pushed to the bottom of the list. The more you can tie things in with the job-monitoring or invoicing systems you use already, the better.

The ‘how’

As well as deciding what you want done, you need to consider how to make sure it’ll all happen smoothly.fire safe

Storing and retrieving the information

Store your DEATHnotes separately from any instructions for retrieving them, and keep both somewhere secure. You don’t want a notice pinned to your office door with ‘Burglars – start here!’ splashed across it. But someone needs to know where it is, otherwise it could be months before they crack your filing system or locate the papers you carefully hid behind a disused filing cabinet in a room marked ‘Beware of the Leopard’ (to misquote Douglas Adams).

Suggestions for storing retrieval instructions included:

  • regularly reprinting or emailing them to someone else
  • keeping them on a non-networked, non-password-protected computer that others can access
  • using an old-fashioned notebook
  • simply telling the responsible person where to look.

Approaches to storing the detailed information ranged from comprehensive spreadsheets or mind maps, to a few key pieces of information on a whiteboard or stuck to the fridge. One thoroughly prepared contributor has ‘a fire safe with all my important documents in it’, along with ICE [in case of emergency] documents containing instructions covering personal and business matters.

MyLawyer recommends writing a ‘letter of wishes’ with detailed requests about winding up your affairs. You can update this easily and cheaply, without needing to involve a solicitor – but make sure your will mentions the letter so people know about it.

Information security

There are two levels to this. First, you need to make sure the information survives after you’ve gone. The fire safe suggestion is helpful if it’s a house fire rather than a collision with public transport that carries you off. If your information is stored electronically, ‘making use of the cloud’ will get round the risk of your laptop going under the wheels with you.

Second, you need to think about the risk of information falling into the wrong hands, even while you’re still alive. One contributor suggested using ‘an encrypted storage facility’. Password-management programs (see http://lifehacker.com/5529133/five-best-password-managers for some suggestions) automatically generate passwords more secure than anything you can come up with, and you only need to keep track of one master password. The security implications of writing this one password down anywhere that’s accessible to others are worth bearing in mind, though.

There’s always a balance to be struck between ease of access and security of information. Only you can decide what you’re comfortable with here, but some of the links below may help.

Testing it out

A trial run of procedures with your responsible person, making sure they understand and can navigate your filing systems, is worthwhile. (For added realism, you could put ‘Police line – do not cross’ tape across your office doorway while you carry it out.)


In short

  • Keep clear records. They have to work for you in the present, but if they’re too idiosyncratic they won’t help others in the future.
  • Choose the right person for the job. Make sure they know what they’ve agreed to.
  • Write a letter of wishes setting out how your instructions should be acted on. Refer to it in your will.
  • Review the detailed information and the letter of wishes periodically or whenever your circumstances change.
  • Put the time in now. We all hope our disaster plans will never be needed, and many won’t, but if you can tie in this advance planning with effective business systems, you might save yourself time and effort in this life, too.

What next?

There were many aspects of this topic on which people wanted more information or support. Some of these point to a possible future role for SfEP (and comparable professional organisations). Any of these might make a good subject for future blogs, for starters:

  • a template document or process for members to use
  • a sample letter of wishes
  • a way of storing ICE contacts for member
  • a toolkit or practical guide
  • more advice on emergency planning for a variety of worst-case scenarios, for sole traders and for limited companies
  • more advice on managing your ‘digital footprint’
  • what’s the client’s perspective on all this?
  • what happens if it’s the client who dies?

It’s clear that there is no one best way to approach this. We hope this overview acts as a catalyst and starting point, and that the links below help you get stuck into the detail. Ultimately, it’s a matter of deciding what fits best with your way of working, the nature of your business and clients, and whoever will be dealing with them after you’ve had your date with the double-decker.

Useful links on succession planning

Notes

1 The question was posed by SI member Jane Read during her session on ‘Having a good relationship with your clients’.

Laura RipperLaura Ripper (www.lauraripperproofreading.com) began working as an editor in 2004, and has been freelance since 2012. She specialises in plain English and is a Professional Member of the CIEP.

 

 

Luke FinleyLuke Finley (www.lukefinley-editorial.co.uk) set up Luke Finley Editorial in 2013. He works for a wide range of clients but specialises in social policy. He is a Professional Member of the CIEP.

 

 

Proofread by CIEP Entry-Level Member Susan Walton.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Originally published October 2015; updated January 2022.