5 Tips for Freelancers for Higher Productivity - from SOLO by Rebecca Seal

It is surely challenging to manage your time and space as a freelancer. Working at unpredictable hours, and being available round the clock to be able to respond and quickly finalize the projects is just the layer of the iceberg that lies above the main pressure of delivering your best qualitative work to make up for the absence of in-person interaction and ensuring trust with your clients. 

However, above every hassle, one thing that freelancers or “soloists”, as put by Rebecca Seal in her book, “Solo: How to Work Alone (And Not Lose Your Mind)”, have to face is managing your time and productivity. 

Here are some tips for you to enhance your work experience and productivity inexplicably: 

Tip 1: Create a dedicated workspace for yourself 

One mistake that freelancers or remote workers make, especially at the start of their journey, is that they take the term “work from the comfort of home” quite too literally. You can’t lie in your bed and expect high-performing activeness from your mind.

Our brain is a quite powerful tool. We can program our minds, and research has shown that if we do something daily in the same space at a fixed time, our body becomes familiar with space and time zone and will automatically get into the rhythm of the task without having to invest much energy and effort. What’s the takeaway? 

Create a specific time and space for yourself!

It doesn’t matter how small, basic, or untraditional it might be. It is your space! So don’t worry about how it should be and just get started with what you can get at the moment and you can always upgrade it with time. Make it can only happen if you will learn to manage to work effectively. 

Moreover, creating a space that is decorated as per your taste and style makes it a lot more meaningful for you and gives you a sense of purpose - making you feel more driven, focused, and joyful. In her TED talk, Fetell Lee emphasizes the importance of such “ordinary things” and how they can significantly bring joy to your everyday routine. 

Tip 2: Make a Routine

“Having to invent yourself from scratch every morning is much much harder than people who haven’t done it imagine. What they see is freedom, and what we see are overwhelming options”, says Margaret Hefferman, a writer, and an entrepreneur.

You surely need some willpower to follow the routine, even if it’s a simple one. But it takes much more “effort to invent your day every day”. So don’t give up. You can start by making small changes, such as trying to wake up half an hour early than you usually do and completing the challenging task in the first two hours of your day. It might not sound much, but it can significantly impact your energy and motivation level by giving you a renewed sense of achievement that will further help you in improved performance. 

Tired of procrastinating? Here are 8 ways to help you beat procrastination! 

Tip 3: Aim for Short And Focused Hours Schedule

Did you know the sinister idea of working long hours of up to 40 hours per week was designed with the assumption that another person would be taking care of all chores of the house, and possibly every other human thing that you need to actually “survive” here in this world? Well, yes. And even if you have a partner that supports you emotionally and takes care of literally all other chores for you, it is still not humanly possible to work such long hours and ensure productivity. So unless you are stuck in the office with a toxic micro-managing boss who forces you to sit by your desk all day, don’t torture yourself with this mindset.

More than working long hours, it is important that we work the hours that are actually enough for us to get out work done. The hustle culture where you are not supposed to have any time for leisure is actually a manifestation of the capitalist system that causes mental health issues, burnout, and numbness leading you to mindless consumption of data and products - profiting the elites in the end. On the other hand, if you ever get the chance to observe wealthy and spiritually aligned people, they always value leisure time and are mindful of their time. They understand the importance of working with a sheer focus for a specific time and then coming back to experience the life they work hard to create for themselves.

So don’t ever restrict yourself to your desk for long hours, but make sure when you are at your working table, you work with utmost focus and dedication. This is the only way to get the most out of your time and yourself for the best performance. 

Tip 4: Don’t Be Afraid of Outsourcing When Overwhelmed

It’s very important to get one thing clear before you start devouring into this field - it is far more important to be “time rich” than be “material rich”, and similarly, it is certainly worse to be “time poor” than to be “material poor”. Yes, it is a thing. 

Let me explain it a bit more for you. Being time-rich means you have some time to yourself. You have the time to rest, you can prioritize your relationships, make time for your family, friends, and hobbies, and in general experience life. On the other hand, being time-poor means the ultimate opposite, which sadly has become a reality for a plethora of adults in this hustle culture. 

But you can get out of this easily and it is by getting help where needed. It is important to understand that even when you choose to work as a freelancer or a “soloist”, you don’t necessarily have to take all the burden on yourself. You can always take help, or outsource some tasks that are basic or too technical for you. There is also a whole position of “virtual assistant” - people who virtually manage your daily tasks, schedule, and other little things for you that might otherwise consume much of your energy, such as checking emails and responding back to simple queries. So don’t limit yourself, developing the right team can actually get you much ahead rather than working completely on your own. 

Moreover, research on money and happiness has shown that outsourcing - whether chores or work - improves well-being to a greater extent than keeping money would have done. So focus on buying time, and you will a significant improvement in your well-being, lifestyle, and productivity. 

Tip 5: Learn How to Make an Effective To-Do List

Yes, the to-do list is a simple list of all things you need to do, but the order in which you list them can have a crucial impact on your performance and productivity. 

As a part of writing this book, Rebecca interviewed Nat Rich, personal responsibility coach with a refreshing idea to manage your time and to-do list effectively. She shares that at the time of the interview, she was at her “lowest ebb” - struggling to manage writing, an investigative article for Guardian, kids, and other basic tasks. Meanwhile, it was the ideal time for her to meet him. And the interview ended with her bawling with the realization of how useful his tips are going to be for her, and I am hoping you will find them just as profound as I found them.

Rich emphasized that when you make a list of tasks randomly, there is a higher chance that you will mention the most basic things at the top with the most important at the end or middle, making them hard to detect and prioritize. 

He proposed the strategy to divide your list into three categories which are

1. Deadline

2. Money

3. Contact

Under the “deadline” section, you mention all of your tasks, regardless of whether they are personal or professional, that need your urgent attention. Then you have the section “money”, you list all the things related to finances here. In the end, all the people you have to talk to, emails, or calls you to have to make go under the “contact” category. 

This categorization allows you to prime your brain before picking up the list of similar tasks, and perform them effectively in less time. Instead of juggling between multiple tasks of varying nature. 

He also emphasized being cautious of what we put into these sections. As a human, you have a certain capacity beyond which you are not able to perform tasks, be it they are as easy as responding to a simple text. So don’t randomly dunk all the things you can think of in these sections. Make it to the point of achieving all the important tasks first, and then think of other ones as a “bonus” for that day. 

In the end, always remember that the soloist lifestyle is all about experimenting. No one has figured it out from the very beginning. It takes time, and it is alright. It’s all about trial and error and adapting to new changes. Just be clear about your priorities, intentions, and values. This will help you detect the system that truly helps you bring out the best in you!