Today I would like to talk about a more general topic that concerns all freelancers in general. How organisation freelance changes your work approach.
This topic does not seem difficult, but sometimes it is quite painful when you switch to freelance for the first time. There are two possible scenarios:
- It seems to you that you have a lot of free time, and work is getting postponed.
- You start working non-stop and without weekends.
Sometimes it seems that working at home is the best thing – you can imagine sleeping as long as you want, you don’t waste time commuting and you are always in your comfortable home environment. On the other hand, freelance organizing turns out so that the work surrounds you from all sides – you make breakfast at the same time answering your mail, fall asleep with your computer, and even a weekend can be busy talking to the customer. If you do not pay attention to the organisation freelance work properly you can quickly burn out. If you are already working as a freelancer, you may have noticed that after a while, even though you began to spend less time on the work itself, but for some reason you began to get more tired, the house ceased to be home, and the work did not end .
Your brain ceases to understand boundaries between work and rest and stops resting, even at the proper time. If we talk about freelancers, we either wait for the gig to start, and this is a psychologically very expensive process, or we do the job, but our brain does not understand that the job ended because after we closed one window we have opened another and started looking for something else on the Internet. It may be not on the working topics, but the brain still does not understand the difference.
And so today I would like to talk about the main points to consider if you decide to go freelance and work from home.
First is to organize your workplace. Ideally, your workspace should not intersect with your personal space – you do not sleep, do not eat, do not rest where you work and vice versa, even if your apartment has very limited space. Try to allocate yourself this separate work area. Of course, it is ideal that you have a separate office for this purpose, but even if it does not work this way, try to delimit your territory somehow.
Try to find a place at home, too, where you only work and nothing else would distract you from this business. Also remember that the furniture is the basis of your working comfort. The writing table should be quite spacious, quite large and always in perfect order. There is such a concept as visual noise. It is desirable to allocate a working zone in a large amount of daylight. Do not forget to ventilate the room regularly – the influx of fresh air does not only beneficially affect your health, but also improves brain function, reduces fatigue and thus increases your efficiency.
Now let’s talk about organizing your time. It’s important to set aside your working hours and operate in the strict time corridor allocated for this purpose. You now have an advantage and you can determine yourself which hours of the day you are most effective. It can be done over several days, calculating your level of productivity each hour, you can freelance time tracking where each hour you mark on a scale from one to ten. Determine how productive you feel, and then graph it. Also be sure to include lunch break, time for a little walk and time for a little warm-up to stretch to your timeline.
Organization of the working day There are many different techniques, programs helping not only to adhere to the established schedule, but also to systematize all your work tasks. They exist, of course, but there is no ideal system and the ideal application, so test a few and see what suits you better. Remember that our time is only our responsibility and you can not just leave things until tomorrow.
Self-discipline affects the final result of your work, so it is very important to stick to a work schedule.
Good rest is vitally important, because when you organize freelance life not only are the boundaries of the house work being blurred, but also the border work rest is very important, no matter what happens. And you must also have several full hours of rest every day. Exercise has not only a positive influence on your health, but also on your work.
In general, organisation freelance is a great opportunity to do more for yourself. Come up with certain rituals. It can be, for example, clothes, as when you work from home there is a very big temptation to wear only pajamas, with not done hair. Try avoiding this mistake.
So start working at home as if you are going to the office – take care of your appearance, comb your hair, shave and only then start working. This will give your brain a signal. And when you’ve finished your work and left your workplace, ideally go outside, walk, go to the store to make a concrete distinction. The most important thing is to take care of yourself, so that fatigue and monotony does not lead to burnout, and your favorite work and home do not become hated.
