photo credit: MarvinSiefke

The New Year offers up new opportunity for freelancers. It’s an exciting time; full of possibility! So, how are you going to make the most of it? In this blog, I want to give you a few ways that you can be more productive in 2010. Some of these are ideas I’ve used successfully in my own freelancing in previous years, and some of them are new strategies developed for this year:

Productivity Tip #1: Time your work. As freelancers, most of us work at home. At times that’s advantageous (because there’s no traffic to fight, no coworkers to avoid, etc.). At times that’s disadvantageous because there’s no one looking over your shoulder. Projects that should take half an hour stretch out to 45 minutes. Projects that take an hour stretch to an hour and a half. To resolve this, I’ve found it helpful to set a timer and try to get your work done in that time. Obviously if you need to go over, you can, but it’s a bit of a motivator to try to finish before the buzzer buzzes. A $3 kitchen timer at Walmart could be a significant productivity investment for you!

Productivity Tip #2: Batch your work: Unless you’re a Renaissance man (or woman), and can do a zillion different things with excellence, it’s likely that you freelance in one area. Writing? Design? Web development? Whatever. Within those “industries”, there are categories of work that you do. As a writer, I might write a bunch of blogs for different people in a day, along with a couple of articles. I’ve found that it’s better off to batch similar projects together. So the article about cats for one customer and the blogs about dogs for the other customer gets done in the morning. After lunch, the article about insurance and the blogs about debt management get done in the afternoon.

Productivity Tip #3: Commit to someone else: A few years ago, I had built up enough respect among my clients that they didn’t set deadlines for me. Guess what happened. Projects lagged. So I made a change a couple of years ago that transformed my productivity: I guaranteed my work on time or clients wouldn’t pay. That may not work for everyone but it was enough of an impetus for me to start projects and finish them. Another commitment I’ve made is with a colleague of mine: Every month we give each other a set of goals and then we follow up a month later.

Productivity Tip #4: Project granularity: One of the reasons that projects don’t get started is because they appear as one big, unwieldy to-do on our list of to-do’s. Lately, I’ve been trying to break projects down into much smaller goals – sort of a “Get Things Done” idea for those of you who follow David Allen’s work. I don’t follow his system strictly (because I have something that works for me already in place) but I do like his “next action step” idea. When you get a new project, break it up into a dozen or a hundred or a thousand steps and just do one after another.

Productivity Tip #5: Develop processes: I have processes for absolutely everything I do. Every time I write a blog, I have 5 things I want to do. Every time I send out a proposal, there are 8 things I want to do. I’ve got these checklists. When it comes time to do that particular task, I open up the checklist and do it. Some might say that it’s too detailed and sucks the creativity out of the work. However, I’ve found that this structure helps me focus my creativity and makes sure that I get my work done!