subject: 5 Tips for Freelancers - How to Become More Productive [print this page] Here are five great methods freelancers can introduce to their work strategy in order to help save time, structure work better and stay as productive as possible.
Tip 1: Use the lunch time power hours
Lunch time is the quietest time of the day, the phone is less likely to ring and you can get down to some serious work. While everyone is having their lunch, you can be taking advantage of this quiet time to get creative. Anyone who calls, leave it to answerphone and ring back after your "lunch"!
Tip 2: Invoicing and admin
Doing your invoicing and accounts bit by bit gets annoying and tedious, try doing all your invoices for that week on a Friday afternoon. Doing this will not break you from your creative flow during the day, it's also a nice way to finish your week off!
Tip 3: Time for creative and time for uncreative
It's been scientifically proven that your brain is at its most creative between 10am & 12pm if you're working normal office hours. With that in mind always try to do your creative tasks in the morning when you are feeling fresh and inspired, instead of trying to be creative in the afternoon when you are drained and ready to pack in for the day.
Uncreative work is much more structured and mundane, more often than not it's a case of just getting your head down and doing the work as opposed to your creative time where you can lose hours if you're not producing anything that looks right, so the less creative work is best saved for the afternoon.
So if you are a freelance web designerfor example then you would ideally design your sites in the morning and write the code for them in the afternoon.
Tip 4: Meetings
If you're not careful meetings and client liaison can rapidly become a full time occupation, clients love to go off on tangents. It's important from a freelancers point of view that meeting stays as topical and as productive as possible. Always spend 5 or 10 minutes planning your meeting, make a list of questions you need to ask your client and work through them, if the meeting begins to digress you will have a point of reference to subtly return the conversation to a topical matter. Time is king, keep your meetings short and snappy, once you have everything you need and you've made sure the client has no further questions you're finished, let the client know that they can call you if they have any other queries, give them a timescale for next contact and you're done.
Tip 5: Sales and promotion
Never stop selling and promoting, every freelancer has experienced the highs and lows' nature of the profession. Maintaining a steady flow of sales and promotion will lead to a more steady work flow. Even when you're fully booked, similar to invoicing and admin, allocate a portion of a day of the week to focus on spreading the word because otherwise you'll work through your busy period and realise you'll have nothing left to do bar sell!
Your time is your money, it is important you manage it and constantly strive to develop new methods of productivity to get the most out of your working hours of the day, this will in turn earn you more money and help you provide a more cost effective service to your clients.
5 Tips for Freelancers - How to Become More Productive
By: Ben Sky
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