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How Work Breaks Help to Boost Focus and Productivity
Image: Brooke Cagle
Contemporary work culture tends to glorify busyness. We often feel pressured into working constantly, pausing only to lament how few hours there are in the day. But our frantic schedules tend to neglect one important fact: working incessantly isn’t sustainable. It isn’t healthy and it doesn’t result in good quality work. In fact, part of working hard — and well — involves integrating work breaks into our day.
This may seem counterintuitive at first, especially if you’re struggling to get on top of your workload and meet your deadlines. You need to work more, not less, right? Not necessarily. Scheduling 10 to 15-minute breaks throughout your day can actually help you get more done, more quickly. Breaks can boost your productivity, improve your creativity, and prevent you from experiencing productivity-killing burnout.
Here, we take a look at the benefits of work breaks, the different types you can take, and why burnout is such a big deal. We also offer a practical solution to help you step away from your desk from time to time.
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Case Study: How Toast Design Simplified Their Time Tracking with Timing
Tracking and correctly attributing time spent on projects is vital for accurate cost estimates and managing your team and business, but can be challenging for agencies with several moving parts.
Toast Design needed a time tracking solution that would help them to simplify attribution of project work. Find out why they work with Timing – watch the video, or continue reading.
“Timing is probably the most awesome timing app that I have ever used…really, really simple to set up, simple to configure, simple to convince the team…” says David.
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How Flex Time Can Improve Work-Life Balance and Job Satisfaction
Image: Christine HumeFlex time, flexitime or flexible hours. It’s often one of the things that draws freelancers to self-employment in the first place, and especially since the pandemic, has become increasingly common among larger companies, too. It refers to the ability (as the name suggests) to be flexible in how you manage your time. It offers some important benefits.
Studies have shown, for example, that flextime decreases work-related stress, boosts job satisfaction, and leads to a greater work-life balance. This is because it can often be difficult to deal with domestic responsibilities like caring for your home, looking after children, and attending to health concerns if your working hours are cast in stone. A little flexibility, however, makes it easier to stay on top of your different commitments. If you’re an employer, there are advantages for you, too, such as increasing productivity and reducing absenteeism and employee turnover.
Let’s take a closer look at what flex time means, and answer some of your questions. What are the pros? Are there any cons? And how can you make a flexible working arrangement part of your business?
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9 Tips to Bill Time Accurately and Boost Your Bottom Line
Image: Wes HicksDoes your business bill time for each project? If so, you’ll know how important it is to track your time accurately. You need to know exactly how much time a particular project takes so that you can quote and invoice correctly, and you need to have a clear sense of whether you’re working productively or if there are more hours you could be billing.
There are countless businesses that operate this way. Those in the legal profession will be all too familiar with this approach, as will accountants, consultants and creatives, including copywriters, designers and developers. Freelancers across industries, who account for 36% of the workforce in the US, as well as agencies, regularly break their work down into hours and bill their time accordingly.
But even if you’re familiar with logging your time, are you sure you’re maximizing your billable hours? Are you working smartly and efficiently? Could you be billing more for your projects and boosting your bottom line? We’re here to offer some handy tips on making your time work for you, and to answer your questions, too.
Take a look at our comprehensive list of tips to help you bill for time — and develop a more successful business while you’re at it.
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The 4 Day Week – Halfway Trial Results and Participating Countries
There is a lot of talk around the six-month trial of a 4-day work week in the United Kingdom. The trial is run by the 4 Day Week Global Foundation who funds research into 4-day week practices, the future of work and workplace wellbeing. The UK trial is in partnership with Autonomy and 4 Day Week UK.
What is the 4 Day Week?
The 4 Day Week Global Foundation is a not-for-profit community established by Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart. It aims to “provide a platform for like-minded people who are interested in supporting the idea of the 4 day week as a part of the future of work”. A future where workers get an extra day off per week with no reduction in pay. This is based on the 100-80-100™ model. Which stands for 100% pay, for 80% of the time and a commitment to maintain at least 100% of the output.
The UK Trial Halfway Results
The UK 6-month trial kicked off in June 2022 and will conclude in November 2022. The full pilot programme started in February this year with information sessions and a call to sign up. More than 70 UK organisations signed up for the 6-month trial with the halfway point results published last month. Some of these results include:
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The Freelancer’s Guide to Creating and Tracking Invoices
As a freelancer, you rely on invoices to get paid for your efforts. Creating useful invoices can mean the difference between getting paid on time and having to wait months before receiving payment.
Sending invoices is a vital part of being a freelancer. Creating a smooth invoicing process will help your cash flow remain steady and get you paid without too much hassle. Getting paid quickly happens when you have and utilize efficient procedures. If your clients don’t know what to do once they receive your invoice, it’s going to take extra time to get paid.
Today’s post will help you as a freelancer understand the best ways to create and track your invoices. When you have better project-tracking practices, you’re in a better place to get paid for all of your efforts.
Create Different Invoices For Various Types of Projects
There are two significant ways freelancers can charge for their services: hourly and per project. Each method has different types of invoicing and different ways to track work.
Billing hourly is simple to track. All you need to do is find a way to track the time spent on each project and charge for each hour you complete. Some clients have a maximum amount of time you can spend on their tasks each week. If this is the case, you need to have measures in place to stop you from working too much. If clients have listed a hard limit, they won’t pay you for any work done over that.
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How to Manage Your Team’s Projects and Times with Timing and Zapier
Please note: while you can still use the guide below for managing your team with Zapier, we now offer Timing for Teams, which is much more convenient.
Two weeks ago, we explained how you can use Timing with Zapier to streamline your billing process. Today, we will build on these foundations to help you manage your team’s projects and times through Zapier. If you are unfamiliar with the process of connecting Timing to Zapier, have a look at that article for a detailed example.
In particular, you can have Zapier automatically create projects for each of your team members, then send their tracked time to a shared Google Sheet for reporting. That way, you can quickly consolidate your time tracking and billing in one place.
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How to Streamline Your Billing Process with Zapier and Timing
One of the most common questions we hear at Timing is: How can I bill my clients for the time I track with Timing?
Thanks to the Timing Web App and its Zapier integration, we now have a much better answer to this question. Our Zapier integration lets you send your times to hundreds of other billing and time tracking services, such as FreshBooks, Quickbooks, Toggl, and many more!
Zapier is a web service that lets you connect thousands of apps, sending data from one service to another. For example, you can use the Timing web app together with Zapier to automatically export tasks, create projects, and even post messages to Slack when you start a task. Zapier automatically processes your data in the background, so you can keep focusing on your work at all times. Simply set your “Zap” once and forget about it — no extra work on your end.
Read on for a step-by-step guide on using Zapier to send your Timing tasks to FreshBooks for invoicing. This process works just as well for a whole lot of other invoicing apps, of course! Plus, we’ll inspire you with several more ideas for integrating your Timing data with other apps.
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The Surprising Ways in Which Insurance Can Help Freelancers
Ashley Baxter is building With Jack, a platform that helps keep freelancers in business. Ashley enjoys sharing her experience of bootstrapping a business as a solo founder in one of the least start-up friendly industries in the world. In this guest article, she outlines why having business insurance is crucial for many freelancers.
Insurance should be a vital part of every freelancer’s toolbox alongside invoicing and working with a contract. Despite this, I’d estimate only a quarter of freelancers are properly insured. This is because insurers do a terrible job of explaining how insurance is useful to you and the type of risks you face on a regular basis.
We’re going to cover some of the common problems freelancers face and the role insurance plays in helping you in these situations.
