3 Tips To Manage Time Effectively As A Freelancer

These tips can be helpful even if you are not a freelancer

Being a freelance writer is a dream come true for me. As I can work on my own time, I get to choose who I work with, and I can work while being available (24/7) for my child. But I admit that becoming a freelancer has a downside too.

People usually see only the happy side of the freelance world. However, they never understand freelancers’ constant struggle to manage time between work and family.

As a freelancer, you must be working from home. Thus you are part of the household routine and the go-to person for other house members. Your work may often interrupted by your surrounding people and one or the other issue happening around you.

With all these things, it is extremely difficult to focus on work. It becomes a challenging task to identify where time is being spent, separate personal and professional life, and what to give priority to.

Here are my 3 tips that can help you overcome these problems and help you manage your time well as a freelancer (even if you are not a freelancer, these tips can be very helpful):

1. Find Out Where You Spend Your Time:

Unless and until you don’t know where your time is being spent, you can’t manage it well. In a book named ‘Do It Today’ by Darius Foroux, he said, that in order to find out where you spend your time, at the end of the day, write down all the things in a notebook that you did every hour of the day.

I know it sounds like too much work at the end of the day. But trust me, I did it myself and it is a very effective method to find out where you are spending your time.

However, I have tweaked it a little to make it more suitable for myself. Instead of writing at the end of the day, I divide this activity into 2 parts. I write twice a day to note down what I did every hour till that time.

Do this activity for at least 3 to 5 days continuously. After that, go through each day’s notes. You will discover so many flaws in your daily routine.

You will find out:

• Things that can be rescheduled to be done at other times of the day, as it does not need to be done during productive hours of your day. And vice versa.
• Things that are taking more time than usual, that you can reduce the time for.
• Things that can be done by others that you can delegate, and must be totally removed from your routine.

After this activity, you will find much time for things that really matter to you. This will help you build a routine that really works for you. This is not once in a lifetime task, rather it must be repeated between 2 months to keep your schedule on track.

This idea was inspired from the book Do It Today.

2. Plan Your Tasks In Advance:

Planning is a very important aspect if you want to achieve more in less time. In planning, you have to decide what exactly you want to do and divide that task into smaller achievable tasks. It would be great if you could figure out the approximate duration for the task and set a time to do that task too.

For example, if you have to write an article on a particular topic then consider it as your main task to achieve. Now let’s divide the task further.

1. Do research. (Approx 2 hrs) — Monday 3 pm
2. Write a first draft. (approx 1.30 hr) — Tuesday 7 am
3. Do the first edit. (approx 1.30 hr) — Wednesday 8 am
4. Do a second edit. (approx 45 minutes) — Thursday 8 am
5. Do the last and final edit. (approx 45 minutes) — Friday 8 am
6. The final read and submit (approx 30 minutes) — Saturday 7 am

Did you see, how planning has simplified the complex task? This way, planning takes the worry off your head and makes you confident of the probability of doing something that you want to achieve. Without planning, worry about the pending task would keep on troubling you.

With planning:

1. You will have clarity on exactly what you have to achieve and approximately how much time it will take to complete it.
2. You can pre-decide at what time you will start working on a particular task in the future. And when that decided time comes just start doing it.

These idea was inspired from the book Goal To Success.

3. Set A Cost To One Hour Of Your Time:

I set the cost to my one hour of time. For example, I have set the value of my one hour as $500. This sounds weird but works like a charm. This will prevent me from doing things that are not worth my time and energy.

For example, I have to buy groceries for my house. Here I have two options: Option 1, buy it from a nearby store that sells groceries at a slightly higher rate. Option 2, buy it from a store that is 3 miles away but has great discounts running.

Here, if you are tempted to go with option 2 then you are making a mistake. Let me tell you how. To buy groceries from the store that is 3 miles away you have to waste your precious 2 hours and energy. It might save you $100 on your total bill as compared to buying groceries from a nearby store, but makes you lose time and energy.

So with option 2, though you might save some bucks ($100) but will lose 2 precious hours (worth $500 each, remember we set the amount to our one hour?). In those 2 hours, you can learn new things, read a good book, do exercise or spend time with loved ones. These things might not give you results immediately (like $100 saved) but can give you great results in the long run in terms of both health and wealth.

These idea was inspired from the book The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness.

Conclusion:

Being a freelancer has both pros and cons associated with it. However, with these 3 tips, you can manage the cons very well while enjoying the pros of being a freelancer.

I highly recommend you dive deep into the books Do It Today where you will get great tips to manage your time, Goal To Success where you will come to know how to plan better for your goal, The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant which is a great guide for wealth and happiness and Freelance Bible to ease your freelance journey.

Follow me (Poonam Bhatt) for more such stories on time management, self-improvement, reading, non-fiction books, and writing. Subscribe to my stories to get email notifications whenever I publish on Medium.