Are You A Freelancer? Here Are 7 Best Time Management Tips You Need To Follow Immediately

"The bad news is time files. The good news is you're the pilot."

- Michael Altshuler

The most crucial aspect of being your own boss is that you have to look at things from your own perspective and be responsible for it from all angles. The discipline, punctuality and productivity involved solely become a matter your personal timeline. Being a freelancer puts you in the same league where you play the challenging as well as demanding role of being your own boss. You may have to deal with times when you are working in some remote corner of the world, or at home among family members and sometimes in an environment that is filled with clutter. All these variables demand a high level of consciousness from your part to become a master of your time management business. Discipline always pays off and here we discuss a few important aspects of planning and maximizing your time when you are at work in order to achieve profitability at its maximum.

Prepare Achievable To-do Lists

One of the best ways of keeping yourself motivated and focused is creating a to-do list that is reasonable as well as achievable. This hugely helps in making the best use of your precious time. You can take the help of specific tools such as the Eisenhower matrix or the Urgent-Important matrix which essentially help you in dividing your time into four quadrants. These quadrants basically categorize themselves as do first, schedule, delegate and don’t do. This would go a long way in allowing you to decide which task should be completed first, which can be delegated and which can be completed later. When you have an unmanageable load of work urgently needing attention, this technique greatly helps in maintaining your sanity.

Keep a Track of Your Time

There are a number of time tracking tools that can supremely help you keep a track of your time and allow you to figure out where your time has been spent over the entire course of the day. You can make an accurate estimation of your task timing if you are aware of the time spent on each task and track your logs and processes. Allocation of your attention and knowledge to a certain project while keeping a track over your time can fix your quantifiable tasks and help you complete them more succinctly. Here are a few ways through which you can create crisp yet effective presentations and save your time. You can also switch over to task timers that can help you in keeping a check over your procrastination and help you manage your projects smoothly.

Stay Away From Distractions

One of the major causes of low productivity among freelancers is the use of social media heavily. This is a giant cause of distraction and proves out to be a big culprit in the long run. Checking your email after every ten minutes, logging into Facebook or Twitter every now and then in order to keep a track over your timeline can eat up a major portion of your valuable time that is meant to be spent over completing your freelance projects. You need to plan your day well-beforehand and make sure that your valuable time is spent on completing your client projects and not in scrolling through your Facebook or Instagram timeline. You can keep aside some portion of your time for checking your emails at some later point of time, but not during working hours. Prepare a list of distractions that are likely to harm your productivity and avoid them as much as possible during the entire course of your busy schedule.

Break Things into Smaller Chunks

It has often been seen that completing a task becomes much easier when it is broken down into smaller parts. This can largely be associated with the fact that workload seems to reduce greatly once you start visualizing your big projects into a series of small ones. The reason is mostly psychological, but this idea helps in gauging the amount of time you need to spend over the entire course of a project while dealing with them one by one. This method makes project completion way easier and comfortable than any other traditional technique that you may have been using earlier.

Learn to Say No

One of the major components of managing your time while working as a freelancer is to recognize which task is important and which one is not. And during this course, you get to handle situations where your time is pretentiously carried away by some unproductive work sessions. You should always be mindful of the amount of work you can manage at a given period of time and learn to say no to clients over projects you can’t manage. This keeps the quality of your work on an enhanced level, and your productivity is also not undermined. It is somewhat difficult to turn down projects that are coming your way, but you need to keep in mind that your time is limited and squeezing any extra project into that confined timeline can reduce the quality of your work and make you regret your decision later. So, always choose your projects wisely.

Structure Your Time Management Routine

The way you get into the habit of structuring your entire working schedule decides heavily the way your productivity level is going to be. While selling your services you need to ensure that you focus on things, paying close attention to ardent details and fit your projects effectively to match with your upcoming insights of the day. You can also try to fill the gaps you encounter while switching over from one project to another by structuring your time over pending projects that were meant to be completed later.

Find Out Your Sweet Spot

The approach towards time management is quite a personal matter which every person determines in his/her own way. You can try to find out different systems of productivity tools, figure out ways to cut out time that is somehow wasted and make a reasonable relocation of your sweet spot. Your own thoughtfulness, comfort zone and productive timings can help you manage your time more smoothly than any other technique that you learn. Feeling overwhelmed as a budding freelancer? Here are a few ways where you can smoothly allow yourself to create a productive yet relaxed platform.

Time management, the effective strategy to know the worth of your time, calls for some conscious techniques, especially when you are working as a freelancer. Your productivity level is bound to depend on how smoothly you are able to make the most of your time through unstrained planning. Prioritizing, modifying your activity schedule, cutting down on procrastination levels and applying some of the strategies discussed above can efficiently maximize your efficiency and expand your creative diaspora.