Time Management Tips for Freelancers

Time management isn't something we're taught in school-we have to learn time management tips on our own. Being self-employed often comes with the benefits of working from home, setting your own hours and choosing which projects you want to take and which projects you don't. The flip side of having that kind of work flexibility is managing your time effectively outside of a structured office environment. 

Separate Work from Home
Instead of working wherever your laptop lands, dedicate a room or a particular area of your house for work and work alone. Having dedicated work space accomplishes two goals: creating a separation between your work and your personal life and the reminder, when you enter your workspace that you're there to work and not anything else.

Set Boundaries
Retail store post signs indicating they're open or closed for business, why not freelancers? If you live alone, setting boundaries that honor your work hours may not be as big of an issue. If you share your home with roommates, spouse or significant other and/or children, you'll need to find ways to communicate your availability (or unavailability as the case may be).

Having control over your work hours makes it easier for others to think that you don't have to work when you're working-you can just drop what you're doing now and pick it up later. Keep your office door closed when you're working or devise another signal that lets family members know when you're not to be interrupted and when it's okay to knock.

Schedule Your Time, Including Breaks
It seems obvious that every freelancer needs a calendar or some kind of system to organize their time. What you use isn't as important as that you actually use the tool you choose to schedule your time-and then stick to that schedule.

At a minimum you need to be aware and/or track how many hours you need to work for the week in order to meet your deadlines and take care of any marketing or administrative tasks you need to complete. You may choose to write out exactly what you plan to accomplish during your work hours on each individual day or you may be fine with simply knowing that you need to put five hours in on Wednesday. Find what method of scheduling works for you and stay with it.

Scheduling breaks into your work day is another effective time management tool. Aim for 15 minutes for every hour of work you've scheduled for the day. Taking time out from work to eat, take a walk or do nothing helps your mind process the work you've just done and when you return to your work, you're more alert and ready to get back to it.

Know When You Work Best
Every person's energy levels are different, but you can get a good idea of when you work best by spending a week or observing how you feel when you work at different times of the day. If you're most productive in the morning, you may want to schedule your work hours for the first half of the day and push meetings or errands to the afternoon.

Likewise, if you peak at night, you may choose to work from midnight until dawn and use your mornings to sleep in. The key is finding the time of day when you're the most alert and the least distracted and using that time to work on your most important projects or tasks for the day.

Review or Rewrite Your To-Do List Daily
It may seem obvious and, in the case of rewriting your to-do list, it may seem tedious, but it works. After all, if you're only generally aware of what you should be spending your time on, it becomes easy to spend your time on less important tasks or on tasks not related to your projects at all. Whether you write your to-do list in your day planner or prefer any number of time management software programs to organize tasks for you, staying on top of what needs to get done, is the first step in getting it done.

Resist Distraction
Be honest about the ways you procrastinate and see if you can't schedule time for those activities before or after your working hours. It's easy to go online to check the weather forecast; then you click on a news headline that links to a blog that interests you and the next thing you know, you've spent more time meandering around the Internet than working.

The same holds true for errands and household tasks-if you're getting less done than you'd like because of these activities, designate a block of time outside working hours to get them done.

Limit E-mail
It's not necessary to respond immediately to every e-mail that lands in your inbox. Learning how to manage your e-mail effectively is a key time management strategy. Check your e-mail on a schedule and no more than three or four times during your work day and keep your e-mail program closed when you're not actively responding.

When you do check e-mail, use folders or a tagging system to identify what needs a response now, what can be pushed off and put on the next day's task list and what needs to be added to your calendar. Respond to urgent items and close your e-mail program.

Screen your Calls
You may not think you spend that much time on the telephone, but if you add up the time spent talking and the time you spend trying to get back to work after each call, you'll see that you lose a significant amount of what could be productive work time each time the telephone rings. Use caller ID or an answering machine to screen your calls or unplug the phone completely and have friends and family rely on an emergency-only cell phone number while you're working.

Stop Multitasking
When you're invoicing, only invoice. When you're writing proposals, write only proposals. When you're answering e-mail, only answer e-mail. While multitasking has its place, studies show that the work multitasking produces takes more time overall than if the tasks were worked on individually in a dedicated manner.

An effective time management technique is to devote the first hour of your day to your most important task-before you check e-mail, before you do anything. At the end of that hour, you're likely to keep working on that task and even if you don't, you've put in a good, solid hour toward a top priority.