Generally, freelancers enjoy the benefit of living a more flexible life than employees do. They can decide when and where they work, making their work experience more pleasant. The caveat, however, is that your work-life balance often falls out of kilter. You end up losing count of the number of hours you put in at work, not realizing that you have very little time left to spend with your family, recreation, social circles, and hobbies. To keep your work-life balance in order, here are a few tried-and-tested strategies that I’ve found to be especially effective. 1. Maintain a Defined Yet Flexible Schedule Without defining your work hours, you run the risk of overworking. Go with the times of day when you are most productive and focused. It can be the usual 9-to-5, from sunset into the wee hours of the night, or whatever works best for you. Then structure your working hours into blocks. For the most part, it’s best to put the “deep work” tasks that you find most demanding of focus at the top of your list, rather than putting it on the latter part. Remember that your attention and willpower are exhaustible resources. By working on your most difficult tasks first, you budget the energy and mental alertness to work on them. But as your own boss, you’re also able to make exceptions to these time blocks. You can rearrange your schedule on the fly, as needed, to accommodate emergencies, special events, and client availability, among others. Also, be sure to communicate your days on and off to your clients, so they know when to expect to hear from you. 2. Minimize Context Switches How many different devices and apps do you use for your freelance work? How many push notifications do you get on each device per day? How many different clients and projects are you juggling at once? Do you find yourself multitasking too much, hopping from one to-do to the next, without completing any of them? What other distractions keep you from delving into deep work and actually getting things done? Context switching is a bona fide productivity killer. The thinner you spread yourself, the less you’ll get done. Source: RescueTime Handling several apps for different tasks will make you feel inefficient and all over the place. You have to remember where to go next, migrate information from silo to silo, log in and out of accounts, and switch interfaces. This makes it impossible to maintain a consolidated view of your projects, issues, and to-dos. Simplify your workflow by using business platforms with all-inclusive functionalities. One especially powerful platform in this sense is vcita, an app lets you take care of everything relating to client marketing, collaboration correspondence, documents, appointments, and billing in one place. Your contacts can also schedule appointments with you or perform any other action through a user-friendly self-service portal . Using business management “suites” like vcita, you can take care of business with fewer distractions, allowing you to be […]
