Time Management Tips

Freelancers work at their own pace and on their own time. However, with the demand for work, excellent time management skills are highly needed for productivity.?

Whether in the family or your day-to-day schedule, it’s tough to juggle all of these, especially when loads of work begin to pile up. One of the biggest internal battles everyone is facing, including freelancers, is?time management.

How you value your time and allocate the number of hours in a day determines the success and production rate of your goal every day. Here are some tips to keep your eye on the ball to effectively manage your time.?

Time Management Tips

1. Identify the priorities and stick to them.

We have different commitments and responsibilities in our families, careers, and businesses. The question is, what keeps you busy? Are the things you do right now worth your effort toward 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.?

Identifying your priorities is the first step in time management. You need to ask yourself the most important things. What makes you happy, and what is it that you want? When you know what 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.?

2. Plan ahead?

If you don’t plan, you will be doing things that are not valuable, and it is a waste of time. Not planning ahead is quite costly, and our main rival is time itself, and you don’t have much of it. Planning ahead means directing your day to allocate sufficient time to complete the tasks and get to your routine to be more efficient and productive. Some secrets to success are preparation, hard work, and learning from failures. Part of the preparation process is to plan ahead to identify the things you have accomplished and have not done in a day. To do so, make a daily schedule and go into details like allocating specific time to finish a task and stick to your routine.?

3. Say no to distractions that make you lose your focus.

Facebook and other social media sites are the leading distractors that deviate many from their focus. That is because of easy access to the internet. You can easily access and browse these sites. Not knowing you have already spent 20-30 minutes scrolling for nothing. The time you spent scrolling on FB and other social media sites could have been enough to complete one task. So it is still a matter of self-discipline. You must deviate from doing things not written on your schedule to have effective time management skills.?

4. Delegate tasks and chores

Even the “Super you” need support. There will be a limited output if you work independently, regardless of how much hard work you put into it. Trying to do things alone might result in poor quality, missed deadlines, and burnout.?

Freelancers often keep accepting projects even though their hands are full and their schedule is tight. So, to avoid this, 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 working with you to get things done immediately.?

5. Evaluate at the end of the day

Sit back and think about what you have accomplished and missed that day. By simply looking back at your schedule, you can identify the following:

• The things you have achieved
• Things you missed
• What took so long to finish a specific task
• Why does it take you so long to accomplish the task, and so on

With these, you already have a guide for improvement and better scheduling next time.?

6. Create a Checklist for the Next Day

A checklist helps you to be more organized and make sure to catch everything in the process. It’s easy to forget things you need to do in a day, but you can avoid this if you have a checklist. Some of the benefits of having a list are the following:

? Save time

Instead of remembering what you will be doing that day, you can make most of the time doing the tasks.

? Productive

You can easily prioritize the most important task and keep track of what you do that day.

? Motivate?

A checklist motivates you to take action and complete the task. Since a checklist makes you more successful and productive, it encourages you to work on your writing. `

7. Rest

After all the hard work and getting things done, you need to reward yourself too. It could be having a vacation, pampering yourself, or simply sleeping well and not doing anything to give you time to breathe and relax. You can only do so much by working so hard. If you fail to give your body a rest, you might be burned out. You may be working so hard to pay the bill for the hospitalization.

Even God rested on the seventh day, so you must 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.

These time management tips will help your?freelancing to thrive.?Subscribe and listen to?The Freelancing Marketplace Podcast ?to access FREE freelancing guides and tips. And if you need the training to start a freelancing career, click here:?https://courses.thesurgemarketplace.com/courses/.