+1 to Freelancer Evolution

Gathered a small list of points of evolution of a freelancer, each +1 will make you more productive or more expensive in the market.
The list is taken from my life, I’ve been a freelancer practicing for a year, I have never left Russia before, visited 9 countries over the past year, I hope to visit another 20 next year.

1) Never forget anything. To do this, I always add every small task to miniplan.ru and I will always receive a letter or sms at the right time, everything is completely free.
2) Self-awareness. When you work without a direct boss, when your salary is not twice / once a month, you need to be as aware of your life as possible, understand how you work, how you get money, whether you hammer for work, what you strive for. If in ordinary life you can go with the flow, then freelance will open the door to a conscious life.
3) Have a rest. There is no employer and you yourself must take care of your vacation, make it so that it is more than if you were working on a direct hire. Do not forget about interruptions in work. Rest will make you more productive or absolutely relax and self-awareness will help you.

4) Morning exercises. She will make you more energetic, and a cup of coffee with a delicious bun will give energy to work out before lunch.
5) Give up on social networks and watching movies and TV shows. A pointless waste of time if you are a free freelancer, look at the world alive, and not through the prism of VKontakte and cinema. * Porn castings are not considered serials.

6) Document everything. I document everything about projects, accesses, infrastructure description, hacks, bugs and much more. The google docs and wiki should help you with this.
7) Establish a project management system. I work in asana, trello, basecamp, megaplan, jira and other systems with customers. For myself, I chose redmine, from opensource the most functional and closest to my requests. I would take saas, but a lot of projects like hired people and saas will come out very expensive, but my friend works alone and uses jira on demand for $ 10.
8) Use a code version control system. Now, in my opinion, the most beneficial for a freelancer will be the study of git and github. The other day I tried to explain about the advantages of version control to one freelancer, he works alone and only on small projects, he failed to explain to me.
9) Learn to manage your time. Here I applied the method of the full distribution of daytime, a couple of months of torment, and I already automatically control the time and I do not need to distribute it in the morning.
10) Work in tandem. habrahabr.ru/post/154181

11) Hire other freelancers in areas in which you are weak. For example, a web programmer always hires a layout designer, and another one has to hire a designer all the time.
12) Be brave. Freelance itself is very unstable and not everyone can work like that. Do not be afraid to tell the customer that you do not have time on time, you can’t do it, suggest solutions (did you not think that there could be solutions?).
13) Be responsible. Very often, freelancers simply disappear, for completely different reasons from the birth of the baby, to just tired. Be responsible and do not disappear, or at least have the courage to say that you have a son and you will not be able to work.
14) Financial discipline. Keep a record of income and expenses, analyze what you spend, optimize costs, maybe you spend too much on custom pizza, and it would be worth spending a couple of weeks in the United Arab Emirates.
15) Have the opportunity to accept or pay money in any way. I currently support: webmoney (the most popular method of paying for services that I buy in Russian freelancers), yandex money (hello to Yandex who recently blocked my account and lost my ticket about fraud, and six months later said no such ticket, start a new one, but he didn’t do anything new either), bank transfer in Russia, transfers gold crown, skrill / moneybookers, paypal, transfers in foreign banks, replenishment of mobile phones.

16) Define the purpose of your work. My goal is to provide the highest quality services in administration, optimization of hosting, clouds and highly loaded systems. And for what purpose are you working?
17) Use monitoring sites and servers with which you work. I use zabbix and webopulsar.ru.
18) Backup everything from the computers on which you are sitting to the servers, code and databases with which you work, the more often the better. For my computers I use backblaze, for five bucks a month they perfectly backup a couple of terabytes from my desktop, for servers there are scripts for save in amazon s3, backup ninja, bacula.
19) Move to a sunny country. I used to think that stories about depression and the lack of the sun are a myth, having lived in Thailand and arrived in Russia, I realized that a sunny day practically charges me and I want to work every day and I don’t need a stick for this. habrahabr.ru/post/151166
20) Self-discipline. No boss no one will make you work. I have a simple rule, I always work at least two hours a day. Not all people can self-discipline, if you can not then freelance is not for you.

21) Get a portfolio. Sometimes customers ask about your competencies, a beautifully designed portfolio is very helpful here. And in general, you can be hired simply after viewing your portfolio.
22) Learn English fluently. habrahabr.ru/post/154333
23) Use clouds (saas, paas, etc.). They really save time and money. For example, instead of deploying my git, I use github.com for five bucks or I can use bitbucket for free. I use the Amazon cloud and at any time I can deploy a test environment there, get the right amount of ip and much more. Clouds are not always profitable; remember this too.
24) Learn as much as possible while you are young, the brain stiffens over the years, the progression is not too fast, but the feeling that you perceive new information worse already exists.
25) Drink delicious coffee. Espresso and cappuccino are two of my strongest weaknesses.

26) Do not abuse alcohol and drugs, I advise you to become addicted to good red wine.
27) Start a blog, write about work, life, hobbies, hobbies. Customers love to read our blogs. My about Thailand pumainthailand.com
28) Make yourself a comfortable workplace with a fast computer. 32 gig of RAM and 4 cores is normal. A comfortable chair will reduce the amount of pain in your back.
29) Automate everything.
31) Learn to formalize any tasks and write technical specifications, specs.
32) Test it. The strangest thing is that the vast majority of freelancers do not have the habit of testing their work.
33) Log in. Often, to add a log it is enough to add one line and in difficult times, when all the logs fall, they just save the situation. User actions are often also worth logging. But remember that our wheels are not rubber yet.

I think it’s not a problem to catch up with this list to 100 points, offer your own.
If you do not understand some point, please try to figure it out together.