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Boost Your Freelance Career: 12 Habits of Highly Effective Freelancers
Image: Canva StudioThe freelance economy is thriving and showing no signs of slowing down.
According to a recent study by Fiverr, there are 1.57 billion people who are pursuing a freelance career, and the freelancing market is worth a staggering $1.5 trillion.
That’s not all.
By 2028, more than 90 million Americans (half of the U.S. workforce!) are expected to make an income from freelance work to some degree.
But with so many people opting to work for themselves over the traditional 9-to-5, it brings up a lot of important questions like:
- How do you stand out in a crowd of so many?
- How do you market yourself to attract your ideal clients?
- How do you make clients come to you instead of spending your precious time and energy hunting them?
The answer is simple.
By implementing these essential habits of highly effective freelancers, you can set your freelancing career up for long-term success.
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Do a Time Audit To Find Out Where Your Time Goes
Image: Studio RepublicWhere do the hours go? Why do you feel like you’ve been working consistently all day, but you’ve only ticked one item off your to-do list? Did that task really only take you a couple of hours, as you’d planned? Or was it maybe more? Knowing exactly how you spend your time on any given day can be tricky. Fortunately, a time audit can help.
A time audit involves recording the hours and minutes of your workday. It helps you account for how you spend your time, and provides valuable insight that you can use to boost your focus and productivity, prevent burnout, and run your business better.
Here, we explore the ins and outs of time audits, including their benefits and how to do one.
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Why Do I Get Easily Distracted? 8 Tips to Help You Focus
Image: Nubelson FernandesYou open your laptop, sift through your priorities, and get started with your workday. Things begin smoothly, and you sense that you likely have a full, productive day ahead. Then, your phone pings with a text. Four emails arrive in a flurry. And you decide to check your social media feed, just for a minute. Before you know it, the day is gone. And with only a handful of items successfully ticked off your to-do list, you’re left asking yourself: “Why do I get easily distracted?”
You’re not alone if you get distracted from time to time. In fact, according to a Harvard study, most people spend 47% of their time thinking about something else. And in the workplace, the typical office worker gets interrupted or changes tasks every three minutes. Since it can take over 23 minutes to get back in the zone once after a distraction, this makes for disjointed and disrupted workdays.
The consequences of this are far-reaching. Distractions make it difficult to stay focused, invest in deep work, and be productive. If you don’t put steps in place to address your distractions, they can ultimately impact your success.
Let’s take a look at why you might get distracted easily, and what tips you can use to limit your distractions.
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Micro Scheduling: How to Hack Your Way to Productivity
Image: Gaining VisualsTime is a non-replenishable resource.
No matter how hard you try, you’ll only have 24 hours in a day to work through your to-do list.
And in our relentless pursuit of success, it can feel like a struggle to manage it effectively. The modern world demands constant multitasking, juggling tasks, and meeting tight deadlines that can overwhelm even the most organized individuals.
But what if you could revolutionize your approach to time management and unlock your true productivity potential?
Enter micro scheduling. A time management method that can change how you approach your to-do list.
In a world where distractions are everywhere, and attention spans are shrinking, microscheduling can hold the key to optimizing every moment of your day.
Here’s how it can help you beat procrastination, scatterbrained work patterns, and turn your goals into reality.
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Setting Work Boundaries: 7 Steps for Better Work Satisfaction
Image: CoWomenBoundaries refer to the limits we set for ourselves. They’re a line in the sand that indicates we’re prepared to go so far and no further. Boundaries are important in all aspects of our life, including at work. Work boundaries help us to stay focused and productive, establish work-life balance, maintain constructive working relationships, boost work satisfaction, and prevent burnout.
If you battle to communicate your needs at work, if the lines between your professional and personal lives regularly blur, or if you constantly feel overwhelmed or exhausted, it’s worth paying attention to the boundaries you have in place. Are they strong enough? Do you need to renegotiate or reinforce them? Examining your boundaries critically can help you stay on track mentally, emotionally and physically.
Here, we explore the different types of boundaries at work. And we offer seven steps that will help you keep good boundaries in place — and reap the rewards.
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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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Asynchronous Work: How to Stay Focused and Productive in the New World of Work
Image: Al ghazaliWorking environments aren’t what they used to be. The days of masses of people huddled in cubicle farms has largely become a thing of the past. Teams are now increasingly decentralized, with a growing number working in various locations, across different time zones, and according to their own schedules. The former synchronous working model we used to live by has been replaced with a new one. Welcome to the world of asynchronous work.
While this trend was gaining traction before the pandemic, there’s no doubt that Covid helped it to become an international phenomenon. Leaders and employees who thought their companies couldn’t work asynchronously were proven wrong. And after working remotely or on a hybrid basis in the years since then, many aren’t going back. A massive McKinsey study has revealed that 58% of employees work today remotely at least part of the time.
Of course, if you’re a freelancer, you’re probably familiar with async work. Some freelancers are expected to work specific hours, be available during certain windows, or even work from a client’s office occasionally. These cases are rare, however. Many dictate their own working hours and habits.
But this doesn’t mean that synchronous work is pointless or outdated. There are plenty of good reasons to work at the same time as, and alongside, other people. Let’s take a look at asynchronous work vs. synchronous work. The pros and cons of each. And how you can stay productive no matter how or where you work.
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The Complete Guide to Project Time Tracking
Image: Louise ViallesoubranneWhile there are many variable metrics that feed into project management, there are always three primary pillars: quality, cost and time. In order to pull off a successful project, you need to complete high-quality work within an agreed budget and a set timeframe. Everything flows from there. Project time tracking is critical to how you manage the third pillar, and affects pillars one and two as well.
When you start a project, you have to assess how much time you need to produce good work. And you need to consider how many of these hours are billable hours, and how much profit you’re likely to make. Keeping track of these hours as the project progresses is important, too. How much time have you used to date? Are you on track? And when you finally invoice, was your original estimation accurate?
An automatic project time tracking tool (like Timing) is the best way to predict, manage, and evaluate the time you spend on a particular project. Let’s look at project time tracking in more detail, including why it’s so important and how to implement it.
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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?
