Let’s talk about how freelancers can increase their productivity and organize their workday from home. After all, these are the basics of time management for remote workers and creating a balance between work and home life. We advise everyone to understand these basics so that tasks don’t cause nervous tremors and work is comfortable and interesting.
A freelancer’s daily routine
One of the key rules is to follow a daily routine. This is not just banal advice, but an opportunity to support your nervous system and find balance. Only by sticking to a specific schedule can you manage to work and pay attention to your family, friends, and hobbies.
Choose the optimal time to wake up and stick to it. At first, you will need an alarm clock. Waking up at the same time every day is good for your body. This helps your biological clock work properly, producing melatonin at the right time and promoting quality, restful sleep. This is the basis of time management for freelancers.
More useful tips for organizing your workday schedule:
- Make time for your hobbies. Schedule half an hour of yoga or reading into your schedule to relax your nervous system.
- Spend time outdoors and socialize with people. Freelancers often forget the importance of leaving the house.
- Set aside time for meals. Make sure you don’t spend extra hours watching the news; this will help you avoid overeating and improve your digestion.
- Don’t get distracted by messages in instant messengers. It’s better to check notifications once an hour or every few hours to stay focused.
Set aside time for checking messages and hobbies.
Want to increase your productivity and reduce stress? Try this experiment: make a schedule for this week and stick to it. You will see how you can get more done and start to feel less stressed.
You can free up even more time by delegating some of your tasks to chatbots. They can warm up your audience to your products and even answer customer questions. This will help you manage your time when working remotely.
Deadlines
A deadline is the deadline by which a task must be completed, a project must be finished, or a set goal must be achieved. This is another key concept in planning in general and time management when working remotely in particular.
With the help of deadlines, you can create achievable and specific plans for yourself, as well as complete work for clients on time.
Properly set deadlines help you:
- get results on time;
- plan joint activities;
- rationally distribute your efforts;
- fight procrastination;
- increase your productivity.
But the main reason for having a deadline is to minimize self-sabotage. When there is no deadline, it is possible to put off a task indefinitely, often without any pain or even remorse. For example, you can spend 2-3 months writing an article for a blog. But not because you lack the energy or time, but simply because you don’t want to get started.
And then the excuses start: “I’m tired,” “I’m not inspired,” “I don’t have the energy.”
When a deadline is set, a countdown timer starts ticking inside you. It bothers you and pushes you to take action.
To make working online enjoyable, we recommend setting two deadlines: an external one and an internal one.
- External. This needs to be set and communicated to the client. It is the deadline by which the task will be completed.
- Internal. You need to set it for yourself; the client does not need to know about it. The internal deadline is always shorter than the external one, so that there is time for unexpected tasks, urgent tasks, or simply unanticipated difficulties with the task.
If you set deadlines in this way, it will be easier to work and easier to meet deadlines.
Here are a few more tips for working with deadlines:
- Justification. The deadline should be justified by the complexity and urgency of the task. If you set arbitrary deadlines, it encourages you to break them — suddenly you can’t get everything ready by the deadline, or, conversely, it’s too far away to start. Don’t just pull a deadline out of thin air.
- Time reserve. For each task, you need to consider not only the possibility of completing it, but also a reserve of 20-40% of the time in case of force majeure. For example, if you need to study your target audience and it usually takes 6 hours, you should specify 12. Suddenly the lights go out, the water breaks, you suddenly fall asleep, or something else happens.
- Pessimism. When making a schedule, it is worth focusing on pessimistic forecasts. If everything goes according to the pessimistic plan, you will be ready for it and your plans will be fulfilled. And if everything turns out better, you can close the task ahead of schedule or adjust it.
And one last piece of advice: don’t set deadlines where you can’t influence the speed and quality of the result. If you can’t predict other people’s actions and the quality of their product, let them set the deadline. For example, you can hire an SMM specialist to promote your blog, but you don’t know when they will bring good results to the blog or if they will be able to achieve them at all.
Distractions
The main thing to do is to put your phone away and silence it. Often, it is the smartphone that causes most distractions from work tasks. Time flies by unnoticed, but all your time management and responsibility suffer because you have to make up for lost time.
The second most popular distraction is family. Someone always needs help, advice, answers to questions, homework checks, or something else. It is important to determine in advance the hours when you cannot be disturbed.
Organized workflow
The most important element of time management is setting working hours. Everyone should know when you work—your parents, children, siblings, other family members, neighbors, and, of course, clients.
The rest of the process depends on the type of work:
- Project-based work is results-oriented, and you can work at any time within the deadline.
- Service-based work is oriented toward working at specific times according to a schedule, and you need to complete your tasks during those times.
If the work is service-oriented, you will have to negotiate with your family or go to coworking spaces, cafes, parks, or squares during working hours.
If your work is project-based and only the result matters, you can choose the hours when no one will disturb you and you can work as efficiently as possible.
Be sure to take breaks during the day — set aside time for lunch or dinner, shopping, exercise, or just relaxing.
Rituals
Our whole life is built on rituals that we don’t even notice. For example, before work, you need to take the subway or train, then have coffee with colleagues, check your email, and only then start your day. Without such rituals, it is often difficult to get into the work process.
For remote work, you can come up with your own rituals that you will repeat every day. This will also help you get in the mood and start completing tasks. For example, you can take a walk in the morning to the store or coffee shop, then sort through your email and start your tasks.
Listen to yourself and choose what you feel comfortable doing before your workday. This greatly helps your inner feelings and mood.
Multitasking
Not everyone can work in this mode; such a workload can easily cause stress and even illness. If multitasking is not necessary, divide all tasks into four groups:
- important and urgent;
- important but not urgent;
- not important but urgent;
- not important and not urgent.
Then set a time and boundaries for each task within which you can complete it. And focus each time on the work for which time has been allocated. This will help you get everything done on time, meet deadlines, and avoid stress.
A comfortable workplace
It’s not obvious, but it’s often easier to work in offices because of the organization of workplaces and how they are perceived. To make your home workspace just as comfortable, you need to create a separate space. Simply buying a desk and chair is not enough.
How to achieve this:
- Work area. It needs to be separated from the rest of the space and equipped with technology and furniture that will only be used for work.
- Storage system. If the size of your apartment does not allow you to set up a full-fledged office, it is better to put all your work things in a box or separate them from the “home” area with a screen. Otherwise, even on weekends or in the evening, everything will remind you of endless work.