Pourtant, j’avais essayé de nombreuses autres solutions pour ne pas avoir à me souvenir de tout (bien que ces exercices de mémoire sont recommandés pour lutter contre un éventuel Altzheimer). Que ce soit Outlook ou les Post-its (qui disparaissent sous les dossiers), les Day Planner, Filofax et autres Exacompta, et sans oublier les fonctions du téléphone mobile, aucune solution n’offrait la souplesse et la facilité que je recherchais.

TeuxDeux est gratuit. Tout du moins pour l’instant. Et ils planchent sur une version pour iPhone et smartphone pour l’an prochain.

Independent professionals don’t have gobs of free time. Many already struggle with work/life balance issues; one of my colleagues, a French to English medical translator, often Skypes me grumbling “Gawd, it’s WDWEWDWE again!” – meaning her husband is hovering over her desk asking when and what is for dinner while she’s on a deadline. Mine occasionally quips I’m married to my computer more than to him.

Many freelancers participate in forums and discussion lists, finding substitutes for the office environment we lack, asking for help and advice, staying abreast of what is going on in our chosen profession, and of course marketing. You get out what you put in, it is important to contribute regularly.

How and when you visit and respond is up to you. The time invested is manageable, and if you’re off-line a few days because you are up to your ears in work, it’s not a big deal. I contribute regularly to about 3 or 4 forums, and occasionally to a couple more. It takes me a few minutes to about an hour a day. That works, it fits in.

As a self-confessed technophile and information junkie, social media attract me as much as a box of chocolates from Christian Constant (if you don’t know this chocolatier, check him out).

For a long time, I stayed on the sidelines, with an inactive blog, a small presence on LinkedIn and an even smaller one on Viadeo. I read a lot, I remained largely silent. Shyness was, I must admit, the main reason. Many don’t comment on blogs they read for that very reason. Please don’t be shy, bloggers love for readers to comment!

This summer, after redesigning my website, I gave myself a swift kick in the okol’e (hawai’ian word for your behind) and prepared a modest professional social media plan: redesign and revive the blog, commit to posting at least twice a week, get my nerve up to comment on others’ blogs, and start to make better use of LinkedIn.

And I’ve been doing that, and enjoying it! It is a bigger time commitment than mere participation on forums, but I still have control over when these activities take place. They do not interrupt my work – translators and copywriters’ work needs concentration and quiet! – and the process of writing blog posts like this one, surprisingly, increases my concentration skills.

Admittedly, my nights have become significantly shorter…

I’d put off joining Twitter until the small lull that hits the mid-November legal holidays in France. I joined with two clear goals in mind: drive traffic to my blog and have links to interesting blog posts and articles delivered to me without spending time looking for them.

After 24 little hours since my first “tweet”, I can sense how the time-concentration issue may spin out. Real-time social media is meant to be used…in real time, if you want to be serious about it and get the benefits you seek from it. TweetDeck is chirping at me every few minutes and even if I limit my curiosity to a cursory look at the maximum 140 characters in the tweet, my concentration nosedives. And tweeting constructively means more than just posting about your new blog post (which I will do in a few minutes) or that the weather’s turned nasty (it hasn’t).

As Billing Time’s chorus (in my book, the national anthem of all intellectual service providers) repeats, “my mind and my time are my merchandise.” I can see how Twitter can become habit-forming; I don’t know yet if it will be useful professionally. I am marginally comfortable with its inherent contradiction: increased connectivity to others, but in an increasingly deconnected way (language included). I do think I’ll have to schedule Tweet Time like dog walks and coffee breaks.

I’d like to hear from translators and freelancers who leverage all these various forms of on-line marketing and networking for business purposes. How and where do you ventilate your “2.0 time”? What tips can you share to preserve work-life balance? Are there social media you’ve tried and abandoned and why?

Not until my computer started to show clear signs of needing a major Spring-cleaning.

My husband will attest that I’m OK with the daily tidying up bit, but ask me to sort out closets and I run for the hills. My computer is more persuasive: “reinstall my OS from scratch or you’ll eat my dust.”

So I chose Saturday to overhaul my C:/ drive. I back up work everyday and do a full back up once a week, so I was all set to go. I figured I’d be done by lunch and be free to enjoy the rest of the day.

Yeah, right (mumbled in a very New York tempo). Like with your toothbrush, coffee maker, and ergonomic pillow, some things are so taken for granted you forget they are there and that you use them everyday. By dinnertime, I had just reinstalled XP Pro, all the drivers, and my essential business tools: what I absolutely cannot face Monday morning without. I had not even gotten to the stack of useful but more creative software (need another free day or two for those!).

Maybe novice or not too tech savvy colleagues will find something useful in this post, and I hope tech junkies will add suggestions to this list of resources. I’ll skip the basics – MS Office, firewall, anti-virus, Internet navigator, Adobe Reader.

My CAT tool is Wordfast Classic, which I use mainly for quality control and individual client glossary development purposes. Repetitions and fuzzy matches are not an issue in the type of work I do, but Wordfast boosts my efficiency and ensures I use client-specific terminology.

In addition to a host of online and paper resources, the Robert Collins French-English digital dictionary is practical when I’m on the go. We all know relying on MS’ spelling and grammar checker is risky and that’s where tools such as Stylewriter for American English or Antidote for French come in: they catch many (OK, not all!) bloopers – by v. buy for example – flag jargon you might want to avoid, zero in on spacing errors, and help you tighten up your final copy. Antidote also includes style guides, an extensive French dictionary, regional variant options, and thesaurus. For publication work in English, The Chicago Manual of Style digital version is an essential companion.

TO3000 and related applications from the great folks at AIT Software make running my business a heck of a lot easier. Quotes, invoicing, tracking payments, and managing work files are a tidy breeze. If you need to assess your productivity, know how much time you really spent on a project, or provide your client with proof of your work hours, then Time Stamp from Syntap Software is a great option.

Data preservation and safety are big issues. I back up work in progress every evening, automatically, with Mozy. If you click on this link and start using Mozy, then both of us will get an extra 256 MB of free storage space (thanks!). If your data gets corrupted or erased somehow, restoring those precious files securely with Mozy is a cakewalk.

Though I have a Gmail account, I prefer dealing with my e-mail off-line, with Outlook. To protect my computer from spam and malicious files, I use MailWasher. If you only have one e-mail account, then the free version will suit you. If you have several, go with the Pro version. MailWasher lets to see all incoming e-mail before it hits your computer (at which time, it is usually too late), set friends and blacklists, delete or bounce e-mail, and restore e-mail you might have deleted accidentally.

What are some of your favorite “I can’t face Monday morning without” tools, aside from a perfectly brewed cup of java?