Freelancers work at their own pace and at their own time. However, with the demand for work be it in the family or in your day to day schedule, it’s very hard to juggle all of these most especially when loads of work begins to pile up.
One of the biggest internal battles that everyone is facing not only freelancers is TIME MANAGEMENT. How you value our time and allocate our number of hours in a day determines the success and production rate of your goal that we set every day.
To effectively manage your time, here are some tips that will keep your eye on the ball:
Identify the priorities and stick to it We all have different commitments and responsibilities in life are it in our family, in our career, in our business. The question is, what keeps you busy with? Are the things you do right now worth all the effort towards your goal? What consumes your day? We all have different priorities. Your priorities may be different from the others. How you set your priorities depends on the things that matter to you the most. To identify your priorities, you need to ask the question, what is the most important things to you? What makes you happy and what is it that you really want? When you know your priorities are, you know what to treasure and what to value. When you have finally figured it out, you have a clear direction on what you want to start first.
Plan ahead If you don’t plan ahead you will be doing things that are not valuable and it is a waste of time. Being able not to plan ahead is quite costly and our main rival is Time itself, and you don’t have much of it. Planning ahead means you are directing your day to allocate sufficient time to complete the tasks and get to your routine to be more efficient and productive. Some of the secret to success is preparation, hard work and learning from failures. Part of the preparation process is to plan ahead for you to identify the things you have accomplished and the things have not in a day. To do so, make a schedule of the day and go into details like allocating specific time to finish a task and stick to your routine.
Say no distractions that lose your focus Facebook and other social media sites are the leading distractors that deviate us from our focus. Knowing that we have the internet that can easily access these sites, we can easily browse them not knowing we have already spent 20-30 minutes of our time scrolling for nothing. The time we spent scrolling on FB and other social media sites could have been enough to get one task done. So it is still a matter of self-discipline. Deviate yourself from doing things that are not written on your schedule.
Delegate tasks and chores Even the “Super you” need support. If you work on your own, there will be a limited output regardless of how much hard work you put into. Trying to do things on your own might result to poor quality, missed deadlines and burn out. Sometimes, in our freelancing journey, we keep on accepting projects even though our hands are full and our schedule is tight. Though things like this cannot be avoided, it is better to delegate the task to lessen the burden. As the saying goes “If you want to go fast, walk alone if you want to go far, walk together”. You need a team who can work with you to get things done right away.
Evaluate at the end of the day Sit back and think about what you have accomplished and things you missed on that day. Just by simply looking back to your schedule, you can identify the things you have achieved, things you missed, what took so long to finish a certain task and why did it took you so long to accomplish the task, and so on. With this, you already have a guide to make room for improvement and better scheduling next time around.
Create a Checklist for the Next Day A checklist helps us to be more organized and not missing anything in the process. It’s easy to forget things that we need to do in a day but it can be avoided once we have a checklist. Some of the benefits of having a checklist are the following: • Save time- instead of focusing on remembering the things you will be doing on that day, you can make most of those time doing the tasks. • Productive- you can easily prioritize the most important task and keep track of the things that you will be doing that day. • Motivate checklist motivates us to take action and complete the task. Since checklist makes us more successful and productive, it motivates us to work on what we have written because of the positive result.
Rest After all the hard work and getting things done, you need to reward yourself too. It might be having a vacation, pampering yourself, or simply taking a good sleep and not doing anything to at least give you time to breathe and relax. You can only do so much in working so hard. If you fail to give your body a rest, it might be burned out. You might just be working so hard to pay the bill for the hospitalization. Even God rested on the seventh day so you also have to do the same.
Effectively managing time can be very challenging for some. Time management takes self-control, self-discipline, and commitment to stick to schedules. Time is the scarcest resource. Unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.-Peter Drucker.
Author: Filipino Virtual Assistance
The original article can be found at: fvaconsultancy.com