Being a freelancer brings with it both good and bad things — on the one hand, what makes this way of doing business extremely tempting is flexibility, and on the other hand, there are certain annoying but solvable difficulties.
The question is whether sometimes too much flexibility can make an even bigger problem?
It is nice to hear that you are your own boss and that you manage your own time and how you use it. But what happens when you run out of motivation and when you realize that you don’t answer to anyone and that you are not under any kind of pressure of that kind?
Just as you demand that the other party behave correctly and in accordance with the agreement, so you need to provide the same treatment. After all, freelancing is a business like any other.
It is hard to keep your focus constant and be equally productive all the time.
So, we will introduce you to 5 best productivity hacks for freelancers and we will try to make it easier for you to improve your way of doing business.
1. Make a list of your daily commitments and manage your time
Some freelancers write weekly or monthly to-do lists but what is more efficient is to solve one immediate problem after another. That way, you stay focused and don’t get tired too quickly.
Sometimes it seems easier to deal with the most difficult tasks later if you are already able to do so, but this usually grows into a delay that eventually grows into an accumulation of commitments impossible to finish.
There are a lot of great task management applications, but what is still the best solution and at the same time a trick is to write your list using your hand and pencil. This will help you organize exactly in your head everything you need to do and to remember it.
Keep your list short and simple and what will be an additional pleasure for you when you start to solve your tasks one by one is the pleasure of crossing out the completed tasks.
You need to carefully monitor how much time you need for each task and, most importantly, you need to be realistic about yourself. You need to be aware of your capabilities and give yourself exactly as much time as it takes you on average to complete a particular task.
For freelancers, it is especially important to distribute their time properly because clients will give them a certain deadline, which means that your project being late could affect the relationship with the client, and thus your earnings.
Darshan Somshekar, who runs Unscrambled Words, only works with freelancers who demonstrate and communicate proper time management. He explains, “To properly run a business, I need to work with freelancers who are punctual and can meet timelines. If they don’t, it has negative downstream effects on my operations.”
People are often not even aware of how much time has passed since they started doing something. This happens normally so there are various time management tools that can come to your aid.
Also, don’t waste time on perfection but focus on the efficiency and effort you put in.
In order to be successful, you must improve your ability to be as efficient as possible.
2. Write a business proposal with ease
Working as a freelancer can be pretty time consuming and it is understandable if you want to make some processes shorter.
For many people, writing a business proposal and presenting their own skills can be really frustrating. There are suspicions and a certain pressure will they do that in the right way.
Even if they are experts in their fields, some people are sceptical about self-presentation and don’t like to talk about personal achievements.
To make this easier for you, you can use tools that can guide you through the whole business proposal writing process and save you a huge amount of time.
You can just add important information and the tool will design a proposal according to your needs.
If you are not excellent at writing about your skills, you can use some ready-made texts and add them to your proposal.
Don’t miss an opportunity to present yourself as a true professional.
3. Create a user-friendly website
The website is an online presentation of your work, a perfect place to include your portfolio and introduce people to your business.
Selling your skills requires a perfectly optimized website. Coming to your website for your visitors should have a user-friendly experience with a beautiful graphic design all allure them to take action.
Besides basic important factors such as speed load, alt tags, text readability, meta description, and similar, there are some other useful hacks that you can use to make your website a more welcoming place for your audience and future clients.You can use a chat feature to start and maintain communication with your visitors. By using it, they can easily reach you and ask for everything they need.
People rarely want to wait for an answer. It is a much better practice to allow your visitors to ask what they want at that exact moment and provide an answer as soon as you can.
If you have a social media account, you can encourage website visitors to visit them by adding social media buttons to your website.
Social media platforms are very popular today and many people spend a large amount of time using them. By adding these buttons, you can increase your chances of getting hired because visitors can now follow what you are posting every day.
You probably already know how social proof is important for any business. Give a chance to your already existing clients to share their feedback about your work and add it to the website. Future clients will gladly read these comments in order to find out what they can expect when they hire you and what you can do for their businesses.
These are just some of the interesting practices to make your website a perfect place for your audience to get to know your skills and achievements that can bring you even more projects.
4. Connect knowledge base with the chatbot
Every professional website has a FAQ page where visitors can get informed about many things they want to find out.
No matter whether there is already existing information, many visitors will still ask for it through the chat. Today, there are tools that can automate this process.
You can save your time by connecting a knowledge base with a chatbot which will answer some of the most frequent visitors’ questions and save you a lot of time.
Thanks to this, you can make the whole process of hiring much shorter because even before they contact you via email or phone directly, potential clients and users will already have answers on many things they wanted to know about.
5. Use shortcuts and improve the organization
This is one of the simplest but equally important productivity hacks that can help you do everything faster.
From desktop shortcuts, bookmarks bars, to web shortcuts, you can save some time and when it comes to freelancing, every minute means a lot. You can do it very quickly, for example, if you want to go immediately to a website that you normally visit often, just create a desktop shortcut by selecting the address from the address bar and dragging it to your computer desktop.
Also, it is very important that you organize your desktop as well as the bookmarks bar itself by cleaning all unnecessary pages so that you can have a clear overview.
A clear overview of the resources you can rely on is always important because it contributes primarily to efficiency and ultimately to your productivity.
Freelancers love shortcuts — who wouldn’t want to make their job easier by shortening the whole process by a step or two.
You can also use the website folder plugin to organize your website more efficiently.
Categorize all of your media files and make it easier to find what you need more quickly.
A higher level of organization can really affect your productivity and save you time.
To Sum up
At the end of the day, the most important habits you should adopt to be as productive as possible are self-discipline, good organization, and self-motivation.
It is important that you try to adopt more and more of these habits over time and you do not have to take big steps at first, it is difficult to change the whole way of functioning at once.
Of course, a larger share of our productivity depends upon ourselves, that is, how willing we are to change our old habits and adopt new routines.
Sometimes it will take months or weeks, and sometimes it will happen that we are able to remember and adopt certain details in a few minutes. And that’s okay.
The most important thing is to give your best.
So, take advantage of these few amazing productivity hacks, and your freelancing business will rise to a higher level.