How To Find Time For… Everything!

Time management is one of the most important skills a freelance worker can learn. With a good time management system you can easily find the time to do the things that are important to you, whether in your professional or personal life.

Successful time management can be challenging, especially to those who are new to freelancing or being self-employed. When you have a boss telling you what to do and when to do it by, it’s much easier to prioritize and figure out what needs to be done and when. But when you’re not only dealing with client deadlines but also all of the day-to-day parts of running a business, on top of trying to maintain some sort of life outside of work, time management gets a whole lot trickier.

Below are sixteen tips to help you better manage your time and find the time to participate in the things that are important to you. Also included are some further resources to improve your time management.

1. Get Organized

Taking time away from your work to find things, whether on your computer or your physical desktop, can be one of the biggest time-wasters out there. This is one of those things that varies a lot by industry and personal preference, but you absolutely need to have a system in place to handle the information, files, and data that comes your way each day. This might include folders and tags on your computers, or file-folders, piles, and inboxes in your physical workspace.

Experiment with different organizational systems until you find one that really works for you. Personally, I have a folder called “work” on my desktop and within that I have folders for each client I work with on a regular basis. For one-off projects I’ll create a folder for that client while I’m working on the project, and then those folders will get moved into a “completed” folder once the project is over (and usually moved to my portable hard drive instead of remaining on my laptop’s hard drive). I have very little physical paperwork, so piles on my desk work just fine for me.

2. Separate Work Space from Everything-Else Space

You need to have a dedicated workspace. If you work in an office, this is easy enough to manage. But if you work from home, you’ll need to put a bit more effort in. Here are a few tips for creating a workspace if you don’t have space for a dedicated office:

• Get a desk. Don’t try to work from your coffee table or dining room table. It’s inefficient and you’ll constantly find yourself having to pick things up just to bring them back out later. It’s better to have a space where you can leave your work things set up all the time.
• Go into “work mode” when you’re in your workspace. This might mean wearing “work clothes” when you’re working. Or it might mean putting shoes on when you’re at your desk (this is one I do most of the time).
• Steal unused space. Is there an unused room, corner of a room, or even closet somewhere in your home? Is it big enough for a desk? If it is, then you might have just found your dedicated office. If your space is part of a larger room, consider buying an office armoire to hide away your work stuff when you’re not using it. If it’s in a closet or other tiny space, a built-in desk and shelving might work best (otherwise you’re likely to waste space with a desk that’s smaller than the total space). Commandeer unused space in your home to carve out a dedicated work space.

3. Take Advantage of Time Management Tools

There are hundreds of tools out there for organizing and managing your time. Whether you opt for a physical date book or calendar or go for an online app, take advantage of the ready-made tools available. I use a combination of tools. Remember the Milk keeps my to-do list (with the Pro version you can also access it from an iPhone). I have a dry-erase calendar for my monthly schedule. And I flag emails that have important information in them until I’m done with that information.

Previously, I’ve used those yellow Post-It notes to keep my to-do list organized (I’d stick them to my desk in front of my keyboard) and a pocket-size black Moleskine notebook. Both tools worked well, but I finally decided I wanted to have a to-do list I could access from anywhere.

There are tons of other time management tools. Experiment with a few and see what seems to fit with the way you work. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” solution out there that will work for everyone. But there’s almost certainly a tool out there for everyone.

4. Set Goals

Setting goals is one of the most important things you can do to manage your time. If you don’t have any goals, how do you know what’s important? What deserves your time and attention? The short answer is: you don’t.

Goals don’t need to be formal. They don’t need to be long-term either (though long-term goals can also help). What they do need to do is focus your attention on what’s important.

One of my goals might be to get all of my work done by Thursday so I can take Friday off, or use Friday to work on a personal project. What that goal does is get me to focus on working more efficiently so I can finish my work in 80% of the time. Cutting 20% of my work time isn’t that big of a deal most weeks. Simply turning off TweetDeck while I work (or setting it to only pull updates every 30 or 60 minutes) can go a long way toward doing that. So can working through lunch or getting up a half hour earlier (or staying up a half hour later).

Your goals should be attainable and specific. You can set recurring goals (”I want to take every Friday off.”) or one-time goals (”I want to finish my new website design by next Tuesday.”) or any combination of the two. You might write them down somewhere or you can just keep them in your head. Just make sure you always have a goal. Your goal could even be as simple as, “finish this logo mockup before lunch.”