How To Improve Your Time Management Skills As A Freelancer

How To Improve Your Time Management Skills As A Freelancer - One of the best and worst things about having freelance jobs is that you have no fixed work hours or supervision!

Without bosses, project managers, timesheets and office schedules; managing your time efficiently as a freelancer is a big challenge. And when you’re freelancing, time is money. Organizing your time well is just as important as delivering projects and finding clients. Successful time management is one of the essential skills to have if you want to succeed at your freelance jobs and make the big bucks! 

Top time management tips to help you make the most of your workday.

1. Plan your Week Ahead

The most obvious tip is up first, yet it’s also the most underrated one. Like any successful company or team, you have to plan your to-do list for the coming week ahead of time and write it down in a detailed schedule, such as applying for freelance jobs online and with specific tasks or deliveries for each day. This is the first step to figure out your workload for the week and estimate the time you need to finish each job.

2. Discover your Productive Sweet Spot

Whether you are working as a Freelance App Developer, Freelance SEO Specialist or are engaged in any other freelance jobs, you will find out that there’s a specific time during the day when you’re most productive.

For some, it’s the early hours of the morning while for others, it might be evening or afternoon. Discovering your productive sweet spot will allow you to use your time much more efficiently, as the next step would be dedicating your most productive hours to creative tasks and big projects while moving emails, administrative work and meetings to times when you’re less productive. Such segregation of your work schedule can do wonders to help you achieve your goals on time.

3. Build a Routine Schedule

As freelancers, we enjoy the freedom of flexibility, but that shouldn’t be confused with a lack of organization. Building a routine around a fixed schedule, like working every day from 9 to 3, minimizes the randomness of your productive output and helps you to keep up with the workload week after week. Freelance jobs are still jobs. A certain amount of discipline and perseverance is necessary to excel at it, just like at any other full-time job.

4. Prioritize your Tasks the Right Way

Once you have your schedule and to-do list ready, it’s time to prioritize your tasks. Using what’s known as the Urgent-important matrix, you can choose what you need to do first (freelance jobs that are urgent and important), what comes later (urgent but not important tasks, or important but not critical), and what can be delegated to others or moved to other days (neither urgent nor essential).

5. Track your Time Accurately

Although time is the essential resource for a freelancer, a lot of frustration comes from trying to figure out how much time was spent on each project or task in a week. Using a time-tracking tool, you can remove the guesswork from the equation and be able to have an accurate overview of how you’re spending your time, your profitability for each task, and so on. There are a lot of time tracking apps and tools out there; some of them are free such a, logwork, and Clockify Me.

6. Avoid Overwhelming Yourself

As a freelancer, it’s easy to say yes to every client that comes your way. However, it’s essential to know when you should turn down a project to avoid overwhelming yourself. Doing your freelance jobs correctly and keeping a good reputation is better than taking too many jobs and compromising the quality of your work.

7. Dedicate a Working Space with no Distractions

During In-office jobs, we get distracted by our colleagues and the company environment. Once we’re freelancers, our biggest distraction becomes nothing but our own selves. Dedicating a specific working space and avoiding nearby distractions at home, such as the TV, family members, social media, and so on, is vital to enhance your productivity and avoid wasted time.

8. Don’t Forget to Take Breaks and Days Off.

When freelancing, it’s easy to fall into one of these two traps: treating all your time as free time or working all the time all week without breaks and days off. Following a fixed schedule will help you to avoid this mistake, but keep in mind that taking off days and breaks is as important as scheduling workdays. Procrastination and low productivity are often the result of exhaustion and burn out. Being well-rested will allow you to focus all your energy on being productive when you’re on those freelance jobs.