Freelancers are great list makers, and it is little wonder. Running your own business, handling multiple clients and projects, leaves you with lots of things to manage and remember.

I know that I start every week, and every day, with “to-do” lists. I consider what needs to get done, what I want to achieve in a given time span. Then I generally end up with a list that is too long, and cut it down to focus on priority items.

Unfortunately, for a long time I found that items I dropped from the day’s “to-do” list didn’t really go away. Continue Reading

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In his book, My Startup Life, Ben Casnocha offers a 30-day plan for becoming a better entrepreneur. I’m not going to rehash Ben’s plan – you’re better off reading the book than hearing about it from me. But I am going to elaborate on the task he assigns for Day 28:

Have multiple side projects going. Diversify your portfolio of interests and activities.

This begs the question: What is a side project?

I like to define them as projects that we usually aren’t paid for and are done in our non-work hours. Here are three examples:

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Freelancers, like their artist and writer predecessors, such as Vincent Van Gogh or Virginia Woolf, may be prone to depression, starving, and self-obsessing. To combat the freelancer blues, you need to schedule some sunshine into your calendar.

Here is a list to save your mind, body and soul from the snake pit.

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Maximizing productivity is a never-ending task for most freelancers. There’s always some way that we can improve or some area that’s lacking the attention it deserves. This post serves as a guide and a reminder for ways that we can get more done and make better use of our time. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

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Having the ability to work from home rather than in a traditional office setting was probably one of the major attractions to freelancing for most of us. However, working solo from home can be a real challenge due to the lack of personal interaction. Although the peace and quiet of working alone is a great benefit, there are times when most of us would prefer to be around more people. If this is ever the case with you, here are ten things you can do to get more interaction as a freelancer.

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One of the realities of being a freelancer is that you will have a wide variety of responsibilities in regards to running a successful business. You won’t have the luxury of passing duties off to another department, and your success depends on your ability to wear multiple hats and develop some versatility. The dizzying amount of responsibilities can be overwhelming at times, but it can also be one of the perks to being a freelancer. You’ll have the opportunity to try your hand at every aspect of business, and you won’t get bored from doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Whether you see this diversity as a positive or a negative of freelancing, you can increase your productivity by realizing all of your responsibilities and setting a plan for success.

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It was one of the most brilliant article ideas you’ve ever had. You sat down and wrote up a beautiful query letter, tailored it perfectly to the publication you were targeting and sent it off. Now to sit and wait to receive the assignment from the editor.

The reply comes faster than usual but instead of containing a word count and a deadline it’s…the form rejection letter.

It wouldn’t normally be a big deal except the article was about a niche topic and this was the perfect magazine to publish it.

Time to toss the idea and move on, right? Wrong. It’s merely time to re-examine it and consider other ways it could be written.

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Freelancers are always facing the need to find new work and keep moving forward in their business. Most of us read a lot about productivity, marketing, pricing, customer service, and these aspects of business are all important. But it’s also important to enjoy the work that you do.

Being a freelancer is a great opportunity that allows you to shape and customize your ideal workstyle. Here is a look at some things you can do to help make your work more enjoyable.

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Ever have one of those days when you can’t seem to write anything?

This is especially disheartening to the freelancer, since no work done means no billable hours. Here’s a personal account of an approach that I started using about seven years ago that really helped with my writing productivity — though it’s adaptable to other types of cerebral freelance work.

It started in Jan 2002, after an offline contract ended. I took a vacation to pursue personal short fiction writing projects. My intent was to make the best of three months, before going out to look for more offline work. (Which didn’t actually happen, as I landed a non-fiction book contract, and then life happened and diverted all my plans.) The net result of three months of productivity was the outlining of 100 short stories and novelettes outlined and sixty completed — or about twenty per month. Continue Reading

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We all know how many responsibilities a freelancer has and how many different hats we have to wear (client work, invoicing and finances, marketing, customer service, etc.). It can be easy to forget that we all have strengths and weaknesses because we spend so much time trying to be good at everything.

In order to do our best work and to maximize efficiency and productivity, we need to recognize what we do well (and what we don’t) and avoid trying to be all things to all people.

From what I see, our weaknesses can be broken down into two categories: 1) specific types of projects, and 2) the various tasks of freelancing. On this first point, most of us have a particular type of service that we specialize in. A designer/developer may be best at designing high-end flash-based sites, and may not be so skilled at designing an attractive website with a minimalist approach, or vice versa. Freelance writers will typically have certain topics or types of writing that they are more experienced with, and so on.

On the second point, we all have certain aspects of freelancing that we excel at, and others that are more of a struggle. For example, you may have a hard time with keeping your invoices and finances organized, but you may excel at dealing directly with clients.

Regardless of what our strengths and weaknesses are, we need to recognize them and realize when we’re not able to do an effective job on a particular project or a specific aspect of freelancing. Continue Reading

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You may have heard about the Pareto Principle, or the 80-20 rule, before. It holds that 20% of causes result in 80% of outputs, 20% of the work causes 80% of the results, 20% of the clients yield 80% of the profit, and so on. The percentages aren’t exact, of course, but the basic premise (that a small percentage of what we do yields most of the results) is an incredibly useful analytical tool for your business.

If you want to learn how to apply the 80-20 rule to client liaison, your choice of clients, your prices and the work you do, this article will explain how to do that. 80-20 freelancing could allow you to do less work while making the same amount of money. If you’re lucky (and savvy), you could end up increasing the profitability of your business by doing less and focusing only on what’s important. Continue Reading

Becoming a better freelancer is a little like learning to play the guitar. There may be certain songs you know and love to play, but if they don’t present a challenge or teach you something new, you won’t progress as a guitarist. Venturing out of your comfort zone is the only way to improve.

And so it is with freelancing. Your skills progress to a certain point that you can complete certain types of jobs quickly and easily — possibly even building on work you’ve already done before. The pressure of having to complete jobs that pay dollars and cents can make it easy to forget the importance of adding future value to your freelancing business — the importance of building new skills and venturing out of your comfort zone.
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