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The Top Hard and Soft Freelancing Skills You Should Spend the Time to Develop
As a freelancer, you’re in charge of everything, including your own personal development. No one will force you to attend classes, take courses, study new techniques, or practice new skills. That all falls on you.
If you’re thinking, “I don’t need to improve; I already know how to do my job,” you’re making a serious mistake. There is always something new to learn, some new way to improve yourself and the work you perform for your clients. To be competitive and find reasons to raise your rates, you must continually develop your skills.
But which skills should you improve? We can help with that. This article lays out the top freelancing skills that will help your career.
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10 Ways to Improve Poor Time Management
Poor time management is detrimental to productivity and brings more stress to work. It is proven to affect work-life balance and relationships with colleagues. Statistics show that the average person tries to solve this problem using 13 different time management methods.
Timing, our automatic time tracking tool for macOS users, helps you overcome this issue. It records your time down to the second and helps you become more productive and efficient.
With Timing, you get reports on your activities which allow you to identify distractions and take measures to improve your time management. To start tracking your time automatically, without having to remember to start and stop timers manually, download Timing today and use a 30-day free trial to test all features.
Today we will discuss the signs that tell if you fall victim to common time management mistakes. We will also give you ten tips to fix these issues, become more productive and efficient, reduce stress, and improve your overall well-being.
We will also explain how time tracking helps identify time management problems and provides data-based insights on potential improvements. Finally, we will present nine ways Timing enables you to combat poor time management.
Before we share our ten tips to improve your time management, let’s explain why that is important.
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10 Ways to Overcome Time Anxiety Using Time Tracking
Modern-day urban life can be hectic. Millions of people are constantly busy and always in a hurry. They race against time, which can have long-term effects on their physical and mental health.
A typical response to this situation is to feel overwhelmed, stressed out, and worried that there is not enough time for what we want to do. It is called time anxiety, affecting more or less everyone juggling multiple professional and personal activities.
Good time management is an antidote to time anxiety. To manage your time, you must first understand how you spend it throughout the day. Automatic time tracking tools, such as our Timing for macOS users, provide detailed reports of your activities. With Timing, you don’t have to remember to start, pause or stop timers since it records your time automatically.
You can track time to the second and use the recorded data to identify distractions and productivity issues in your daily work. Timing helps you understand where your time goes and gives you complete control over the deep-level data you can’t gather with manual time tracking. What’s best, you can download Timing and start a 30-day free trial today.
In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons for time anxiety and how it affects your mental health. We’ll also explain how time tracking helps you overcome time anxiety and focus on meaningful activities. Before we share our tips for overcoming time anxiety, let’s define what it is.
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Freelancing Red Flags: 16 Signs to Abandon That Problem Client
Freelancing is more popular than ever, which means more people and businesses are using freelancers to meet their needs. It’s a tremendous time to be a freelancer as nearly every industry is embracing this work model, especially since the pandemic.
But while many of your client relationships are healthy, productive, and lucrative, some just aren’t worth the trouble. As a freelancer, it’s smart to identify your problem clients and abandon them quickly. The sooner you call it quits with a bad client, the sooner you can start working with a good one.
How do you predict if a client will be a problem? By looking out for red flags that indicate the arrangement won’t be pleasant for you. This article lays out the top freelancing red flags and what to do if you spot them.
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Top Five Time Tracking Software for Architects
Image source: energepic.com
Architects have a strong need for accurate time tracking software. Many freelance architects and architectural firms charge by the hour. However, their hourly rate is only one side of the equation. Architects also need a reliable record of billable hours to manage project costs and invoice their clients accurately.
As an architect, you need an automatic time tracking tool that is either part of your project management software or a standalone solution that you can integrate with your toolset to keep your projects moving forward.
A time tracking app, such as our Timing for macOS, can help you create more accurate timesheets through automation. Timing does not require manual time logging or entries. Instead, it automatically tracks how much time you spend on each app, document, and website. This means you always know how much time you spend on work-related activities, allowing you to concentrate on your most important tasks.
Timing also has you covered with a web app you can use on your mobile iOS or Android device. It lets you start and stop timers manually during your offline meetings, site visits, and when you’re generally out of the office. You can check our website to learn more or download Timing to start your 30-day free trial and see how it works.
In this article, we will discuss the benefits of automatic time tracking software for architects and shortlist the top five timekeeping apps you can use to get a more accurate picture of how you spend your workday.
Before we start with our top picks, let’s dive into why architects need reliable time tracking tools.
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Attorney Time Tracking: 5 Best Tools to Measure the Value of Your Work
Image source: Mateus Campos Felipe
Attorney time tracking is one of the most important administrative tasks in a law practice. With most attorneys charging an hourly rate, precise tracking of work-related activities presents a challenge since your income depends on timekeeping. The more reliable your time tracking app is, the more accurate your billing will be.
Ironically, both timekeeping and billing are administrative tasks. The time you spend on them is not case-related, making it non-billable. However, you can’t skip it because your revenue depends on it. That’s why attorneys need reliable time tracking tools that provide detailed reports on how they spend their workdays.
With Timing, our automatic time tracking tool for macOS users, you will never worry about tracking the time you spend on work-related activities. Since Timing records your time automatically, you won’t have to remember to start and stop timers yourself. You can focus and work without distraction. Timing also provides detailed reports and gives you complete control over the deep-level data, which is impossible to gather with manual time tracking.
Using Timing reports saves time and increases accuracy when billing your clients, ensuring that no time is accidentally left unbilled. It helps you gain clients’ trust and improve your reputation. You can download our app and start your 30-day free trial to see how Timing works.
In this article, we’ll discuss the advantages of time tracking software for lawyers. We’ll outline the must-have features and how they help with the daily timekeeping challenges. Finally, we’ll list the five best lawyer time tracking tools and discuss each tool’s pros and cons.
Before we get to the top five, let’s start with attorneys’ common timekeeping challenges.
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Should You Call Yourself a Freelancer? Why Your Title Might Be Holding You Back
The words you use to describe yourself matter. Words affect your personal brand. They influence people’s perception of you, especially when a few words is all they know about you. If you want to be a successful freelancer, you need to be thoughtful with the words you use to describe yourself and your work.
The words we speak aloud can even affect our own brains. Simply introducing yourself to a client can change the way you view yourself. If you refer to yourself as an experienced professional, eventually, you will start to think of yourself as such. But if you refer to yourself as an amateur or newbie, that’s exactly what you’ll be.
Self-perception is important because words can influence your own mood and behavior. Having repetitive negative thoughts can activate the brain’s fear center. If you think of yourself as an imposter who lacks control over their work and career, you’ll present that message to clients and prospects through your behavior and language.
Your title is one of the first pieces of information that prospective clients learn about you. It should tell clients who you are and how you can help them. This begs the question: Are you introducing yourself properly? Does it make sense to call yourself a “freelancer,” or is there a different way to set the stage for client relationships?
In this article, we help you understand whether it makes sense to call yourself a freelancer or if a different term is more suitable for your career.
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Why (and How) You Should Schedule Time For Your Relationship
Time tracking is for work… right? Think again. While it might seem unromantic to schedule time with your significant other, it can actually be the opposite.
Do you remember the early days of your relationship, when you would move earth and heaven to make a date work? It didn’t matter if you were tired from work, just back from a trip, or had something else that mysteriously ‘just happened’ to get rescheduled, if you were really excited about someone you would make time to see them. What about now? Do you still make time for your partner?
As February is the month of Valentine’s, it’s a good excuse to think about your lovelife — whether you subscribe to the idea of Valentine’s Day or not. Regardless if you’ve been together six months, a year, or married for ten, chances are you’ve fallen into a rut or five. Particularly if you live together, chances are you’re spending a lot of time in each other’s company without actually being together. Overtime, this will naturally lead to dissatisfaction in and the breakdown of your relationship.
Aside from not wanting to lose your loved one, why is it important to work on being happy and present in a relationship? Well, studies show that when you’re in a fulfilling relationship, everything in life is better — from your performance at work to your cardiac health. We’ve come up with five different ways you can schedule time in your relationship, for a happier relationship and happier life.
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How Deep Work Can Help Increase Your Productivity
In our age of constant distraction, true productivity is never quite within our reach. This is a huge issue for knowledge workers, who are often distracted from their main tasks by administrative work, emails, chat notifications, and, of course, social media.
But what’s the answer to this issue? According to writer and computer science professor Cal Newport, the solution is ‘deep work’. Newport believes that by reducing or eliminating ‘shallow work’ and prioritizing ‘deep work’, we can regain our lost focus and improve our productivity, skills, and even our happiness.
In this article, you’ll discover how deep work can benefit your professional and personal life and how you can implement a deep work strategy. As an entrepreneur, you’ll learn how deep work can help your business grow and develop, and if you have employees, these tips can be passed down to benefit your whole organization.
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Freelance Goal Setting: How to Create Reasonable and Achievable Goals
As a freelancer, there’s no one standing over your shoulder, telling you what to work on next. No one measures your progress or checks off your milestones. And there’s no one making sure your career is on the right path. All of that falls on you.
If you want to be successful, it’s essential to set effective goals. Goals are the beginning of your plans, barometers of your success, and the launching-off points for your work. They offer several significant benefits that freelancers can’t ignore:
- Goals give you focus and direction by creating targets for which you’ll aim.
- Goals help you see how far you’ve come.
- Goals help you gain skills and improve yourself.
- Goals ensure you deliver quality work to your clients to ensure you always meet their needs.
- Achieving your goals makes you feel confident, empowered, and motivated to keep growing as a freelancer.
Marketing guru Seth Godin says it perfectly: “The thing about goals is that living without them is a lot more fun, in the short run. It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact … those people have goals.”
