Five work methods for a freelancer

    imageAlmost a year ago, I became a freelancer, got a job on the American stock exchange odesk.com and began to work slowly. Over time, the number and complexity of orders grew, and of course I developed five working methods.

    I note that not everything is as simple as I described in the article, I perfectly understand that there are many other factors, if there is a desire, I invite you to discuss them in the comments.

    Modes or methods depend on 7 factors:

    1) A woman is the most important factor, since she decides everything.
    2) Weather - either you swim or sit at home drinking hot coffee, and outside the window there is snow / rain / women.
    3) The geographical position, in Russia it works very poorly, in Sweden, on the contrary, there is some kind of drive in the work, although in Thailand you want to work, but you don’t forget about the rest.
    4) Availability and quality of the Internet.
    5) Mood
    6) Days of the week, weekends or weekdays.
    7) The amount of alcohol in the blood, it’s nice to work at lunch with a steak and a bottle of wine, or stick to a good beer at night, or it doesn’t work at all for cocktails in a strip bar.

    First technique

    The simplest and most correct, all tasks are divided into sub-tasks with a deadline of less than a day, all subtasks are set to the start day (it is also the day of completion). All sorts of task managers are very useful here, I currently work in 5 managers. For myself I use planfix and miniplan, I sit with clients in trello, asana, basecamp. If you are a sane and adequate person and will do everything on it, then your projects will be delivered on time and everything will be fine.

    Second technique

    It differs from the first and is used by me when too lazy to break everything into subtasks and stuff. I just sit down and start making a project. A simple example of an ad site for a large customer is something like this.
    1) You need to choose cms I take oxy classifieds (5-10 min).
    2) I deploy the linux instance (15 minutes).
    3) I go to freelance order a quick and simple design (15 minutes of my time and in the evening there will be a simple design).
    4) I see that there are no ads, I go to freelance ordering a parser of ads with auto-posting (I spend 30 minutes and two days later I will have a working parser with comprehension, and then real users will catch up).
    5) Something there the customer said about seo, I look at the plugins in cms about seo, I configure the CNC, title and other seo things (1 hour).
    6) Seo2 is necessary for Google to find out about us, I go to freelance and order for 100 rubles to collect urls + keywords from the site (about 15 minutes of my time, the result in the form of a table url -> the keyword in two hours).
    7) I order from the runner to make me a thousand other links on my table in the internet (hour).
    8) I am testing nominal safety and preparing documentation for the customer (2 hours).
    9) I do a load test (1-2 hours).
    10) The design came (everything is made up) I hang it on the site (15-30 minutes).
    11) The parser came, install and test (1-5 hours).
    12) I hire someone on a freelance thread so that he writes a good letter for mailing (15 minutes).
    13) I do a newsletter for 100,000 people that we have a website (30 minutes).
    I send the result and documentation to the customer.
    All this can happen in one day or three. The technique is good when the project is already on the deadline or already close to it, just its description, you sit down and do it stupidly (I apologize for the word stupidly).

    Third technique

    Proactive Time Release Technique. It is applied when the second does not work. That is, there is a task for which the deadline, the customer calls Skype 50 times, but you didn’t start doing it, the blood is full of alcohol, the day off, the pretty girl on the bed, just a very boring and not interesting task, and other factors completely prevent us from applying second technique. Then I abruptly begin to do other tasks. The next day is coming and you understand that you have no tasks other than this and start to do an expired task with nothing to do. This technique allows you not to fail projects very much.

    Fourth technique

    There comes a time when it is full of energy, but absolutely not willing to engage in current tasks. At such moments, the main thing is not to merge your motivation and energy into the trash. These days I usually write articles on my blog or on a hub, these days I try to do small projects just for fun. You go to freelance, you hire a programmer for 500 rubles, and voila, you get some sort of small short-lived project. This week I made a first attempt to take a programmer Habra habrahabr.ru/qa/25775 . I hope we will have something to write about in I am promoting this week.

    Fifth technique

    When my hands dropped completely. This happens to everyone, I see no visible reasons for this except for biocycles. On such days, you don’t have to work, but just stick in the passive rest, watch a movie, play Diablo 2 with old friends, stare anime all day, buy fresh guinness keg, just spit in the stream all day, and other options for passive rest. The next day you will wake up peaceful and thirsty for action. If you neglect this technique, then this condition can drag on for several days, or even weeks.

    Freelancer, how do you work? Tell us about your experience in the comments.

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