Ever feel like you're trying to do it all, all by yourself? Is it noble? Is it admirable? Or, is it just plain old foolish?

Is there really any such thing as a self-made success?

I say "no way!"

You can try building your writing business this way, but it's a sure recipe for burn-out, costly mistakes, and a lot of unnecessary headaches. For certain, it's not putting good time mastery principles to use.

You see, one huge part of using your time wisely is knowing when not to use YOUR time. To get most things done, you need either time or money. As we've discussed before, time is really your most precious commodity. It can't be replaced.

In your writing business, there are four levels of competency:

• Incompetent: These are things you absolutely can't do. Even if you worked really hard to improve, you'd only make marginal progress. Things like this might include setting up your tax and legal entity structure, doing your books, printing your marketing materials - all kinds of things people routinely hire a specialist to do for them.
• Competent: These are the things you're okay at, but not great. They might include running errands to the bank, the post office, the copy store. You could do them, but so could anyone else.
• Excellence: These are things you do exceptionally well. Maybe it's writing SEO articles, e-books, website content, or brochure text. You're skilled at these types of tasks, and do them better than most people you know.
• Genius: This is something you do better than anyone else - it's where your gift lies. It's really something special. Ideally, you'll figure out what this is, and be able to spend the bulk of your time doing it. It can take years - decades even - to figure it out though.

Now, if you're building a writing business, where do you think you should spend most of your time? Filing? Filling out deposit slips? Balancing a checkbook? Or, how about actually WRITING?

But, all those other things need to be done, too! And some of them are really, really important to the success of your business.

For example, if you're working as a sole proprietor, you're going to take a punch in the gut when tax time rolls around. Unless you're an accountant or attorney, you probably don't know a whole lot about tax entities (and you probably don't care to!). But having the right entity in place makes a huge difference in how much of your writing income you actually get to keep. So, are you going to go enroll in a college class to learn about tax law? Leave that kind of stuff to the specialists. It's not worth your time. Good time management means you'll pay someone else to take care of this stuff for you, so you are free to do what you do best.

(As an aside, if you're looking for a great accountant who's experienced with working with freelance writers, I'll share mine: Paul Paradis. You can email me at info@workingwriterhappywriter.com with "Accountant" in the subject line, and I'll get you his info. I don't know how many more clients he can take on, but I'll vouch for his patience and skills.)