Celebrating a chat I had with my boss – and opportunity to be less perfectionist with writing

Hi,
Recently, I’ve been struggling with my boss’s expectations. I work part time at an online magazine. And it’s specifically around how fast she thinks I can write a feature.
I completely understand that there are (low) budgets and time pressures. But, honestly, I’m working as fast as I can and I can’t meet her deadlines.
For example, I bought in a celeb interview recently – which was using my own contacts, and I could have pitched it to someone else as a freelancer so I thought I was doing a good thing and going over and above the bare minimum of my job there. She gave me a day to write it and even then I had to negotiate that. I asked to wfh as I know I’m more productive writing here. And she resisted initially then agreed. But it ended up taking me sooo much longer… I worked all day until 10:30pm. Then worked until 3pm the next day (unpaid) to finish it.
This isn’t the first time this has happened at the mag. And it was the last straw on top of already feeling anxious about money / and resentful about my day rate there (which I have realised I severely under-charged when I first joined as I didn’t fully understand how much you have to inflate it for pension, holiday, sick pay etc).
As a result, when I saw her next, I asked for a chat about it. I said how long it had taken me, that it isn’t financially sustainable for me to continue bringing features like this to them if I can’t have enough time to write them. She still thinks I’m too slow! I said she has 25 years more experience than me, and I’m getting quicker but that right now this is me doing my best. I then asked to invoice for an extra day to compensate for this (and another previous piece I’d worked overtime on). She agreed to it – which was a big win, but it was such a scary, awkward conversation and I feel like our relationship is still recovering!
However, I’m really proud of myself for asserting myself. I felt like I was being walked over and taken for a bit of a ride (which is how I feel about my day rate too). So this was a step in the right direction of advocating for that. So I wanted to share that and celebrate it!
But, it also raised an interesting theme – which is about me being too perfectionist with my writing and that this is stopping me earning as much as I should be.
Do you have any tips on how I can take a messy massive action approach to my writing, where I do it faster and trust my judgement?
Thanks so much

 

 

Answer:

Interesting to notice how you started the question asking about your boss’s expectations and finished with wanting to become a faster, more confident writer.  How could this be such a great opportunity for you? Sometimes the people in our lives who push us the most (and push our buttons the most) are our greatest teachers. What do you want?