The best thing about freelance work is that you are free to create your own schedule and rules. However, this can be a bad factor. Without a normally structured office space, many freelancers at the end of the day may think about where all their time has gone. It can be difficult to get the most out of your entire work day. To help these freelancers, we want to introduce some simple ways to increase productivity.

1. Create a work schedule.

Decide on the working hours.
Defining working hours creates a sense of accountability and puts control over working hours, making you spend less time in vain.

Create a clearly defined schedule and follow it. If you decide to start working at 8 in the morning, then get up on time, take a shower, get dressed and start work on time. A trip in sleepy steps, in your pajamas to your office, will not create the mood for productive work. Following these rules, you will be pleased to notice that your productivity has greatly increased.

Take breaks.
Studies have shown that people who take short breaks during the work day manage to do much more. Spending a few minutes away from the workplace and work environment will return you to the workplace more fresh and readily begin the next task. Go for a walk, eat some hamburger, or get to the nearest coffee shop. In your schedule, leave half an hour or an hour for such a vacation. Skipping such a break will leave you more time to work, but working with an empty stomach leads to poor concentration. You should focus more on quality than quantity. Thirty minutes of focused work is much better than an absent-minded hour.

2. Plan.

Define goals.

Without goals, we will soon realize that we are aimlessly going through life. Goals keep us on track with a clear vision of what we're going to. Define short, medium, and long term goals for yourself. More specifically, what would you like to achieve this week, this month, this year. Long-term goals help determine short-term goals. For some time, think about what you still want to achieve, then write it all down.

Create job lists.

Use your weekly task list to create daily task lists. You can use any tools for creating such task lists, both local and online.. Or you can use an old pencil and a piece of paper. Regardless of which method you use, planning your work day is important to focus on work. Create a task list for the next day at the end of each day and follow this list.

Break large tasks into smaller ones.

When you create your list of tasks, you don’t have to write too long concepts and actions, for example, “Work on an article about productivity” or “Work on logo design”. Specify, for example, “Do a research for an article about productivity” or “Define the concept of a logo”. When you are specific, you narrow down the scope of the task, thereby working more efficiently. Leave general definitions for your goals.

Track the time.

Some good apps fortime tracking will help you manage your work time. It is important to know if you use your time wisely. Write down how much time you spend on tasks - you will be surprised to find out how much time you are wasting. Knowing how much time it takes to complete each task will help you better plan your days, leading to greater efficiency.

Evaluate the quality of your performance.

At the end of the working day, see how you coped with the tasks of this day. Have you managed to do everything that you intended to do on this day? If not, why? Performance evaluation is a critical step towards improving productivity. Set realistic but attractive goals and honestly evaluate your performance to determine if there is room for improvement.

3. Concentrate.

Perform one task at a time.

Multitasking has grown from a computer term and has become part of our daily vocabulary. Many people believe that much can be done by performing many tasks at the same time. This statement cannot be far from the truth. In fact, completing one task with full attention is much better than doing two tasks with half the attention on each of them. The separation of concentration between several tasks leads only to a shared quality and, in fact, to lower productivity. Perform only one task, and you will notice that your productivity increases with the quality of work.

Limit the time you spend surfing the web.

Take some time to surf the web and use it directly to work. Use the RSS feed reader to receive new content from sites and blogs you are interested in. This is much more effective than visiting these sites several times a day to see if something new has been published or not. If you are already using the application for reading RSS feeds , then you will probably need to go through all the channels that you have and leave only those that are really interesting to you.

Do not be distructed.

Determine the time of day for checking mail and social networks. This is better than leaving your email client and Twitter open so you can be distracted by them several times a day. Decide how much time you are willing to spend on them. For example, you may decide to check your mail and reply to emails twice a day. What do you think will be better, answer 30 letters periodically for the whole day or read and answer them briefly all together?

4. Be organized.

Combine your email inboxes.

Many of us have several electronic mailboxes, which we use for different purposes. Why not collect all the mail in one place? Sign up for a Gmail account if you don’t have one yet. It is free and probably the best of its kind. Once you complete your account registration, you can configure it to receive emails from all your other email addresses. You can also configure filters for received emails. Now you can work with all received mail in one convenient place.

Use shortcuts to organize your mail.

Gmail uses shortcuts instead of folders. Labels work the same way as folders, with the difference that an email can have several labels at once instead of being in the same folder. Set up shortcuts (or folders if you're not using Gmail) with the name “Urgent” to separate important emails. In Gmail, you can even put these labels automatically when you receive emails instead of having to do it manually.

Update your social network accounts all at once.

Social networks are a good way for a freelancer to find new customers, communicate with colleagues, receive news about innovations in their field. Many of us have accounts on several social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Simple surfing on all these sites is already difficult, not to mention the loss of time. Why then not update them all at once instead of going to each site individually and writing a post there? With the help of social network aggregators, you can not only write posts on these social networking sites, but also read what your friends and colleagues write there, all in one place.

5. Set up your office properly.

Respect your office.

Keep your office clean. On the desktop, leave only the necessary things - a computer, phone, printer, etc. Scattered things on the table negatively affect your mood, which will then affect your work. Take this time and put all the things in their place, leaving the things you need on your desktop. Finding the right things, walking to the printer to the other end of the room can increase your wasted time.

Create comfort.

Make your office comfortable by opening a window on a bright sunny day or by turning on your favorite music. Your office should not look like a damp dungeon where you will feel like a slave. You should like being there. Spend some money on an ergonomic chair, keyboard and mouse. Back pain will not make you more productive. Exploreergonomics in order to learn how to create a comfortable office.

Be mobile.

One of the benefits of freelancing is that you do not have to always work in the same place. If you are not very comfortable, change the atmosphere while working at a local coffee shop, bookstore or park. A change in environment can have a good effect on your productivity and many cities have free WiFi access points . Just grab your laptop and go!

6. Get help.

Outsourcing

Hire an assistant. It will be much better to pay money to an assistant for working with documents and invoices than spending your time on this activity. Let the tax go professional: the accountant will do the job in a professional manner and you won’t have to worry about it. There are many services for small business owners. Which one do you need?

Learn from other freelancers.

Visit the freelancer forums often. A good portion of knowledge and new ideas are added to the forums every day. You can find out how best to work with clients and what is the best application for creating invoices. Become a member of the community and benefit from the collective experience of freelancers like you.

UPD Moved to freelance blog.