How many hours does a copywriter work

Answering random emails. Buying office supplies. Checking in on social media. Admin tasks, reporting, and regular bookkeeping.

And a million other similar smaller tasks. These are often things you can accomplish with less mental horsepower. By allocating blocks of time to knock these smaller items off your to-do list, you still get them done, AND — more importantly — you leave bigger chunks of time to do deep work. Even though most weeks my schedule can be very flexible for phone calls, I limit my scheduling using Book Like A Boss to specific times and days that preserve my deep-work time.

Some days, research falls under deep work. In fact, a lot of my writing time is spent researching, to back up narratives that are coming out of my fingers as they bang on my keyboard. The former I consider deep work. And, in fact, my real work hours extend beyond what I track, largely because I do so much reading outside of traditional work hours. And this reading contributes to my total research. There are other tasks like this — such as phone calls — that can swing both ways.

Try things. There is so much more I could share — but the deep work distinction has been THE most critical to getting things done. And the one that leads to the most pain when I forget the lesson. Thanks for sharing your typical day. I'm especially heartened to see I'm not the only one who takes nearly an hour to warm up… I used to think that by doing light work I could get myself in the groove, but I've discovered that only pushes off the inevitable, and makes it more likely that I'll procrastinate.

My problem is that I have so many things that require large chunks of time marketing, etc , but once I get into the groove I hate switching to another task. Hey Roy! As for me personally, I almost always do some work on the weekends. Perhaps not as much as on a regular workday, but a few hours each day for sure. I typically have more work than I can get done during the week. I feel happy if I knock a few items off my To Do List over the weekend.

It helps relieve the stress of Monday mornings. I like the sense of accomplishment. I realize I just told the world how boring I am. As you can tell, I do really enjoy my copywriting work. I also have financial goals, and I like that every job I do brings me closer to those goals.

Bec Christensen wrote on November 19th, Now, thanks to you I have a ready made response duly acknowledged of course. I have not yet mastered the art of quoting the hours it takes me to do a job, and am always under-doing myself on my hourly rate. Happy for you to use it. It benefits us all. I still struggle with estimating. Sometimes it jumps onto the page willingly.

Others it needs to be driven with a stick. And clients are equally unpredictable…. Simon Hillier wrote on November 19th, Thanks for going to the effort to gather the information and share it. And, of course, for explaining why copy takes time to finesse.

Ahh, if only copywriting was like law and we could bill by the hour every time we even thought about a client. Granted, some of that was accidental, but my time management oversight was only possible because I wanted to give them more time to make the copy just right.

Simon Hillier wrote on November 20th, I hear ya! Lisa Cropman wrote on November 20th, Amen to that Glen! Brilliant post. Thanks for the insight. You also have to give them the time to process it. Plus you have to dedicate some of your time to teaching them. Not that I blame the client.

How can they be expected to know? Hopefully this post will help. A little. Vanessa Anthony wrote on November 27th, Glenn, so refreshing to hear somebody break it down for clients so unapologetically. I wish someone had been around writing posts like this when I first started out. Pingback: 33 software tools for freelance copywriters.

Pingback: My most popular copywriting blog posts of all time. I had a writer review my basic copy for a website. I took me a fair chunk of time to write it all out in basic form so i could give them a thorough understanding.

The message was there it just needed refining and perked up a bit. And fix my grammar and remove unneeded words. I was too close to it to properly edit it myself and figured with their experience i would have a copywriter edit it. I have a new but very simple product on the surface. But it is quite complex with the problems it solves.

Its kinda hard to believe. I for-warned them not to underestimate it in the copy. I gave them everything they needed to write good copy, well i thought so anyway.

I even had videos for them to watch to explain it out really well. It took about 6 weeks for them to get it back to me with many revisions in between.

Was a shame for the amount of work that went into it, let alone the wasted 6 weeks.