Blog - Daily Thoughts

17/04/2011

Working as a self-employed freelancer has its ups and downs. On one side, there is the chance of working from home, in your own environment, staying up as late as you want, waking up when you feel like it and so on.

 

 

But, freelancing has its downsides as well. Being home, you can easily get disturbed by kids or any other family members, but also by different tasks you might want to do over the day. You never have a fixed salary, but you earn as much as you work for. Some months you work a lot and earn only decent amounts of money, while other months you work less but earn more. You can never be sure.Working from home might push you into missing deadlines and thus receiving poor feedback and less money.

Regardless where do you work from, you always need to be productive as a freelancer, because you earn as much as you work for. Working faster, but keeping the same quality, is going to be good for you, and we are going to recommend 10 ways to improve your productivity as a freelancer.

 

1. Organize Your E-mail

As a freelancer, you might have at least three mail addresses, and if you are successful enough you will get lots of e-mails each day. Organizing your inbox might take some time, up to few hours or even a full day, but it will pay off. I spent four hours organizing my inbox, marking e-mails as spam, creating folders and getting up to date with all the e-mail reading. Since then I never had problems with my correspondence anymore, and I am never more than one day behind reading and answering my e-mails.

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Try to have a folder where you can move e-mails that don’t need immediate attention, and this way you avoid losing time with unuseful Power Points or offers received from friends.

2. Do not keep Your E-mail open

Many freelancers have a fast e-mail answering policy. It’s fine to reply fast to e-mails, but I do not recommend you keep the Outlook or whatever applications you use to open all the time. You will get informed of each e-mail you get and trust me, checking and answering an e-mail each 20 minutes is worse than answering nine e-mails once at three hours. Moreover, reading and answering e-mails will interrupt your work, and you might forget where you have to start from again.

3. Keep a To-do List

It can be a daily, weekly or monthly list, but keep it. I think the shorter the period is, the better you will be able to follow it, but this needs to be your choice. Keeping a to-do list and checking it often will motivate you to finish the tasks in time.

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Tip: If you have a project with a 5-day turnaround time, insert it on your list with a four-day deadline. Sometimes, you will forget you did that and having the project done faster than requested will bring you bonus points in the employer’s eyes.

4. Minimize the Browsing Time

Try not to browse too much. You will find yourself answering to Facebook messages, sharing interesting tweets and so on. It doesn’t look too different from checking the e-mail, but it’s actually worse. Once you check all your e-mails, you will get back to work. But if you are online and browse on Facebook or Twitter, you will fly from link to link and will end up half an hour later with nothing productive done.

This applies for the feeds as well. Either shorten the list, or check them outside your working schedule.

5. Finish More Important Tasks First

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Experienced freelancers have several tasks to do at the same time, and it is not easy to keep the pace up. Keep in mind which of them are the most important and work on those first. Note the deadlines, the progress and the difficulty to decide which project has to be worked on first. Do not waste time with fivearticles that need to be reviewed for three weeks from now.

6. Move and Get Some Exercises

Working in an office and sitting for eight hours in a chair is not healthy and is not helping you be more productive either but when you work from home, you can just take a half-hour break and move; Stretch out; do some push-ups, sit-ups, run for 3 km and you can do everything, as long as for that half an hour you get your mind off work.

7. Plan Vacations in Advance

Leaving for a vacation is as important as taking breaks during daily work routine. Plan the vacation in advance, because otherwise you might not have enough time for it. Freelancers are working hard for money and with the summer or winter vacation approaching; they might prefer to work instead of taking some days off. Unless you book your holiday early on, it might not happen at all.

8. Consider the Payment When Accepting a Job

Most of the freelance jobs in the internet are actually either scams, or either poor-paying jobs. Write 10 500-word articles for $10, design me a whole PHP site with $50 in two days, translate a 5000-word document in six hours for $25, and so on. “Filipino writers preferred”. Do you get the point? You have seen tons of these before and for sure a lot more out there.

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Do not accept these kinds of jobs. Sure, when you are a beginner and need money and experience it’s a total different situation, but once you are experienced, ask for decent rates for your work. Opt for jobs out there which offer you more money for the same amount of work, not the jobs with cheap paying employers. Anyway those are the type of jobs every freelancer targets…the good paying ones.

9. Work between Different Hours

Though you are a home-working freelancer, you can still make a schedule for your work. Pick eight hours daily, let’s say between 9:00 and 17:00, with a total of one and a half hour brake during it. Most important, stick with it! This way you will avoid doing dishes, washing clothes, vacuuming or checking the post box. Once you get used to it, you will feel that between the preset working hours you are actually supposed to work. It won’t feel like something you might want to do to increase productivity, but like something normal.

10. Check your progress each day

Though you already have a to-do list, checking the progress at the end of each day might be even more helpful. Note down what you did, what you failed to finish and what worked and didn’t worked for you that day. You will be able to keep tracks of what you do and use the good situations to improve your work.

There are obviously lots of other ways to improve your productivity, but those are the most important I have used when I started freelancing. The daily schedule is normal; my inbox is organized and clean; I enjoy fantastic vacations; and choose my own work and always deliver on deadline, thanks to the to-do list and progress check.

Few of those might sound strange to you and it might take a longer time for you to get used to them, but once you manage to, you will see visible results and an improved freelancing life.