Staying Motivated Without a Boss (part 1)
Many freelancers find discipline and motivation a problem. You start out with the best of intentions, but soon find yourself waking up at midday and lounging in front of the tv. These are the first in a series of tips and tricks you can employ to stay motivated when you don’t have a boss on your back.
Give your client a timeline even if they don’t ask for it
A good way to make sure you don’t waste your days is to give yourself a tight schedule and put it in writing for your client. Commit to dates for small milestones throughout the project, so hopefully you won’t find yourself working through the night to meet your deadline.
Begin the day the right way
Many people look forward to sleeping in when they start working for themselves. Unfortunately I’ve found sleeping in and a focussed work day do not mix. Wake up with your alarm clock and get to work immediately. It’s so much harder to begin work if you’ve started the day by lazing around – in fact I find if I start the day by sleeping in or relaxing, it’s next to impossible for me to get a good work day in. By waking up early and spending your morning at work, even if you lose your focus later in the day you’ve already gotten some good work done.
Make a To Do list every morning
A fantastic habit to get into is to start every day by writing a To Do list. Write down everything from your previous days To Do list, then everything new that may have arrived in the last 24 hours. Next, take a highlighter and mark the things that you want to complete that day and number them in the order that you’re going to complete them. Then make sure you follow your list! This will also stop you from picking the ‘fun’ jobs and avoiding the challenging ones, something most freelancers are guilty of! If you scorn paper and pen, there are some great online tools you can use, such as Ta-Da Lists.
So there are the first few tips to help you stay motivated. If there’s anything that works for you, please share it in the comments!
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I love to-do lists, though to be honest they don’t stop me from doing the fun jobs ahead of the non-fun jobs.
The #1 thing that keeps me motivated is looking at my bank account and freaking out
Daily to-do lists are evil, at least in my opinion. They have never worked that well for me, so I decided to use a simplified and heavily hacked personal adaptation of the GTD – Getting Things Done methodology. For now, it’s working quite well, I am getting things actually…done.
Whats the Getting Things Done methodology? To-do lists work for me sometimes, I find I go through phases with them
When I don’t feel like thinking, I try to find some simple work to do; I call it the “ant-work”. Something like populate a list, copy & paste text, cropping an image, rename files, any activity that is easy and repeatitive but has to be done, and so it could make time goes faster and keep you from worried thoughts and creative collapses.
Yeah great tips, I actually find a good breakfast the best way to start, many times I have started without anything in my belly and its bad, whole day wasted!!
This website also has some good tips, some you’ve already stated, others you have not.
http://f6design.com/journal/2007/03/15/time-management-tips-for-freelancers/
Doin To-do lists is a great thing. I’m a novice of GTD but the process is really helping me along keeping my projects etc. organized. 37signal’s Backpack (http://backpackit.com) is a great tool for to-do lists that I will only review when online since a page can have lots of lists and reordering them (even exchanging items between lists) is implemented nicer than on http://tadalist.com.
Still nothing was able to beat my paper-based system, though.
Just my opinion, of course
Jack:
“GTD” is about teaching you habits to collect, process, organize and do stuff. Working on habits isn’t all that easy since you’ll probably have a bunch of them ahead of you. Learning everything at once is hard, but the basic idea behind GTD is pretty straightforward. Look for http://zenhabits.com, http://43folders.com or just google for GTD. You’ll eventually stumple upon a lot of blogs covering this topic once you start finding some of them since they’re heavily connected/linked.
Oh ***, I’m starting to feel watched.
Anyway, Great Post
Hmm this comes in mind of most freelancers but with practice and focus one can overcome it