Just a little heads up that now this website includes www.davidhitchcock.net, www.davidhitchcock.org, and www.davidhitchcock.info in addition to the original www.davidbhitchcock.com .
For a while I had them pointing to my Helium.com account, but this more central location will be their new and hopefully permanent home.
I’m sure you read the title and are already rolling your eyes. But it is true – if you keep your resume up to date it will help you in a number of different ways you may never have considered.
You will have your work history fresh in your memory, so you will remember what you did 10 years ago better. Also this will give you more confidence because you will see how you have progressed over the years instead of being focused on the day-to-day tasks of a typical job.
You will be able to talk about your past with friends, family, co-workers, ex-co-workers, and recruiting agents. Yes, this is called networking. But the funny part is that if you do it properly it won’t seem like networking, but simply chatting with friends.
If the worst happens and you are unexpectedly downsized, you have a resume ready to go without worrying about it. The minute you walk out the door you can already be calling around to set up interviews – much better than the typical week or so people wait before starting their job hunt, usually to work on their resume.
You can easily update catch phrases and keywords for older jobs. The way you described a job 10 years ago will likely benefit from a new description today. If you don’t update your resume, HR people will treat that job as out of date and not relevant.
Best of all, an up to date resume helps you plan your career. If you know where you have been its much easier to plan where you want to go. If you have a career plan, you will be ahead of most people in the job market who just want to get a job and the paycheck that comes with it.
So for all these reasons and more, you really should spend a few minutes each month keeping your resume up to date.
Everyone is tempted to estimate as close as possible to what their numbers say. That means you are dropping your safety factor, which is unthinkable!
Professionals from all walks of life have a built-in safety/profit factor on all their estimates. For example, if I think I’ll have to spend 10 day writing on a project I will estimate more to leave room for unexpected events, or problems.
Sure if you cut your profits/safety factor you might get more jobs, but what happens when you get sick? Its easy to get the flu and be unable to work for 3 days. Now my 10 day project just ballooned to 13. And that is ignoring any other typical project problems. Not to mention freelance writers seldom have paid sick days.
So build in a safety factor you are comfortable with, and don’t play around with it!
Lately I’ve noticed that the more I hunker down in my writing “cave” to just get work done, the less and less I want to interact with people. This also can end up with some writing that lacks the insight that truly writing for an audience provides.
When you write, you have to keep your audience in mind. You write a university term paper differently than you would a blog entry on the same topic. The reason is they are aimed at different audiences, and you write them accordingly.
If you loose sight of your audience while you are writing, the quality of your writing goes down. In this case the main measure of quality is how useful it is to the people who read it or need it. For example, think of all the instruction manuals you have read that include steps you cannot understand. The quality of those manuals are very low because you cannot use them for the intended purpose.
So my two cents on this topic is – get out into society on a regular basis, and interact with real people from different walks of life. If you do this with an open mind, every conversation will help you understand that audience a little better, and help you write for them a little better as well.
These days its likely a problem that most people want – too much work and too little time. As a writer its hard for me to decide what to do.
For freelance jobs its easy to raise my rates and get less work due to it. The jobs are short so the opportunity comes up more often than at a full time day job.
Another option is to act as a project manager, and delegate smaller bits of writing to other writers at a slightly reduced rate. I still keep control, and still make some money but not as much as doing it all myself.
The final option I can think of is just to outright pass work on to colleagues. This is a last resort because I loose the work and the money from it. The only good side is that the other writers will do the same for me down the road – hopefully when I have time to handle the extra work.
Like I said these are the growing pains most people look forward to. But that doesn’t make them any easier to deal with and be happy with the outcome.
If only I could copy myself a few times…
This month traditionally I never seem to get anything done off my todo list. There are many things that pop up such as family flu, weather, post-Christmas clean up, or even just the winter blues.
This year has been no different. I haven’t had hardly any chance to write since before January 1. The one change is that I’m playing a social game to spend more quality time with family. So far its working, but its really sucking time away from other things on the long term schedule.
For some of my friends its an even busier time – one is starting a new job, another is becoming a father again, and yet another is getting married in the Caribbean next week.
I believe this month people need to focus on the “must do” things in their life, and remember that the “fun to do” things sometimes sit on the shelf for a while. Otherwise you’re having fun but drowning in your own filth!
OK, for some a year ending in zero is the start not the end.
Personally, I start counting from one. 
No matter how you look at it, tomorrow is the start of a New Year. You know this for sure because you get a day off from work to remind you about it.
Personally I fell resolutions should not be dreamland-never-gonna-get-there type things, but instead should be incremental goals to help inspire you along the road you want to take towards improving your life in some way. I believe this because you are more likely to accomplish these goals which means you will a) feel better about yourself, b) be more likely to set additional goals to keep it rolling, and c) be able encourage your friends who have trouble with their goals.
If you regret things from 2010, its too late to do anything about them now. Apart from make 2011 better!
See you next year!
Party
This month (Dec 2010) Helium changed their upfront payments.
Previously if you wrote anarticle to almost any topic with less than 5 articles written to it, you got an upfront payment based on the number of writing stars you had.
Now if you do that – nada it seems. Instead, they are posting the articles they want to Marketplace where previously it was only 3rd party publishers who posted there. Plus Helium is only paying $2-5 per article there, which is generally a lot less than other publishers on Markeplace.
So far I’m doing ok with the new style of things, but we’ll have to see how it goes over the next month or so.
I can see that it allows Helium to a) direct their topics a bit more, b) edit these articles on important topics, and c) payout only for topics that are important (ie. generate lots of hits and click-money for them.
The times they are a-changing, as the song says. Have to see if its for better or worse.
You were so busy writing that your forgot to go out shopping for your loved ones’ presents. Now you either have to face huge lineups at the stores, or buy something online and give it before New Years (since I won’t get here in time now!).
There is another option open to you – donate to charities. While people do this all the time, writers have a more unique way of following through on this. Many websites where you write guides or articles, allow you to give the proceeds to a charity of your choice instead of laughing all the way to PayPal with your hard earned money.
This can be a fun way to give a gift because a) you can choose a charity that your loved one cares about, b) you can write a manual or article on something they also care about, and c) that loved one can watch your article or guide to see how well it does and how much gets donated to charity for them!
You aren’t just giving the money – any poor schlep can do that! Instead you are putting time, effort, thought, and your money into something that a person can enjoy and spend time enjoying after the giving is done.
Check it out! If the website that you write for doesn’t offer charity giving, ask them why not and try to get them to do it. If enough people ask, they will change their ways.
All that, and I bet it is faster than standing in 1 line at 1 store!
My parting words in this hectic season come from Mr.Miagi – Don’t forget to breathe, Daniel-san!
For anyone who writes freelance articles, this is a busy time of year. Actually from before Halloween its busy right through to early January. That is because of all the holidays and holiday specific writing that websites are looking for.
It may be ironic that the common thread to all these holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) is that diet articles are always in big demand! Sure you can always find an audience for how to cook with fewer calories, or how to say no during the holidays, but those diet articles about how to shed the pounds after the holidays always seem to do better for some reason.
Fortinet tweets- Fortinet: Print the FortiGate CookBook using http://t.co/qoSOUbnq. The cost covers printing and shipping. http://t.co/AlNdP3fY February 24, 2012
- Fortinet: TechDocs is creating videos and an ibook of our FortiGate Cookbook. See what we have so far at http://t.co/GpmwrR0G February 23, 2012
- Fortinet: Fortinet was recently highlighted in "Mad Money" where Cramer talks about Fortinet. Check it out http://t.co/55AYdZO5 February 23, 2012
- Fortinet: Docs update: Updated System Guides for the FortiGate-5001B and FortiSwitch 5003, 5203B blades. February 22, 2012
- Fortinet: Docs update: New Carrier Handbook and updated CLI Reference for FortiOS 4.0MR3, updated FortiWeb Log Message Reference. February 22, 2012