By Leo Babauta.

Working without a boss, freelance workers need to find ways to motivate themselves, keep themselves organized and productive, and actually get things done on their own.

It’s a challenge faced by any freelance worker. Enter Getting Things Done, freelancer style.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is one of the most popular productivity systems, especially among those on the Internet, freelancers among them. In fact, many of the early adopters of GTD were freelancers, as they knew that the power and flexibility of GTD is exactly what they were looking for.

However, GTD’s flexibility can also be a difficulty for many people, so today we’ll look at ways that GTD can be applied specifically to freelancers.

Limit inboxes. Freelancers have information coming at them a thousand ways: multiple email accounts, IM, Twitter, comments on their blogs or Facebook/MySpace accounts, RSS feed readers, voice mail, mail and other physical documents. It can be confusing, and things can get lost or forgotten. It’s important that you take an inventory of all the ways that information or documents enter your life — GTD calls these “collection buckets” — and find ways to consolidate them into as few inboxes or buckets as possible.

The more buckets you have, the more you have to check each day, and the more complicated things will be, and the more you will forget or lose things. Instead, simplify as much as possible. Just have one email account, and one physical inbox. Have your voicemail forwarded to email, and the same thing with blog comments and other digital information.

Process quickly. With so much information coming in, you’ll want to be able to sort through it quickly, making quick decisions and getting your inbox empty. Follow the steps outlined in the post 10 Essential Email Skills, in the “Get your inbox to empty” section. Be sure to check your inboxes and clear them out once a day.

Projects. Keep a list of all of your projects. For each one, write a sentence or two to clearly state your desired outcome, and decide on the “next action” needed to move the project forward. See A Guide to Simple Project Management for more.

Next actions. Each project should have a “next action” attached to it to move it forward. This should be a distinct, physical action, not a task that requires several actions. For example, “write report” could be a task, but the “next action” would be “outline report” or “write introduction”.

By focusing on actual physical next actions, you end the tendency to be overwhelmed by freelance assignments on your to-do lists that can’t actually be completed in one step. List all of your next actions in a to-do list or in one of several context lists (see below).

Deadlines. We freelancers need deadlines. We can’t get our work done without them. It’s the pressure of a deadline that motivates us to stop messing around and to get to work. While deadlines are not an official part of GTD, they are essential to GTD for freelancers.

How can you use deadlines to make GTD work for you, as a freelancer? Well think of it this way: previous time-management systems would give deadlines to each task or project by putting them on a certain date on a calendar. GTD changed that, and said that you don’t need to schedule each task — just focus on the next action.

So take that concept, and just give a deadline to your next action. Sure, each freelance assignment will probably have an overall deadline, but within each assignment are several next actions. Focus on the next “next action”, and give it a deadline (and communicate that to your client). When you meet that deadline, focus on the next “next action” and give that a deadline, and so on.

Context lists. In GTD, instead of having one big to-do list with everything on it, you break it up into next actions sorted by context, so that in any given context (work, home, errands, calls, computer, etc.), you are only looking at the tasks you can do right now. So in GTD, you have several lists.

Create a context list just for your freelance assignments, especially if you have a day job. You want to keep them separate, so that you know at any time what next actions you need to do for your freelance career.

Group tasks. Another important function of context lists is that you group like tasks together, which allows you to do all of one kind of task at once (all your calls at once, for example). This is more efficient than switching back and forth between different contexts. So, as a freelancer, realize the different types of tasks that you do for your freelance work, and separate those. You might have calls, writing, designing, research, emailing clients, invoicing, etc. If you group them together, you can do all of one type of tasks at once, batch processing them to make them more efficient.

Separate freelance work. This was noted under the “context lists” section above, but it’s important to keep your freelance work separate from your day job (if you have one) or other business, as well as from your personal life. So you should not only group freelance work in a separate context list (or lists), but keep it physically separate as well. Do your freelance work at a separate time (and possibly place, if it helps) from your regular work or personal tasks. It will make you more efficient, and keep things from getting confused.

Weekly review. The key to holding the GTD system together is the weekly review. It’s an entire multi-step process that we won’t get into here, but you should have at least some form of weekly review to ensure that you are staying on top of your projects and next actions.

As a freelancer, you probably don’t have a lot of time to devote to the weekly review, but at the very least, I would devote 20-30 minutes to ensuring that your project list and context lists are up to date, and emptying your inboxes.

Other items. There are other things in GTD, such as keeping a notebook or PDA handy everywhere you go so you can write down ideas and tasks, or setting up a tickler system, a calendar, and a reference system for holding different types of information, or creating follow-up and someday/maybe lists. But while these are useful, they aren’t essential to the freelancer as the above items. If you’re interested in getting into these other items, I would recommend you read David Allen’s book, or start with the GTD FAQ.