#FreelanceFocus

Book of the week: Focus – The Power of Targeted Thinking

| Lifestyle & Time out

Freelancers need focus; without a boss to keep you in line and being outside a traditional workflow it can be hard to know where to focus your efforts. Combine this with the pace of modern life and it’s easy to get swamped and to feel that there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Not only is there a lot of work there are constant distractions, tweets, bleeps and pings pulling us away from our true goals and aspirations.

Focus: The Power of Targeted Thinking attempts to give the solution to all these feelings of confusion and distraction.

Read more

1

Taking the time to manage, prioritise & plan what’s truly important

| Training

Prioritising and planning how you use your time is a key skill for every great freelancer. Freelancing gives you the freedom to choose what you do and when you do it.

This freedom can have shortcomings however as it’s very easy to be distracted by emails, twitter and other interruptions — and it’s tempting to focus on doing those tasks you like instead of those which may be most useful.

Read more

Start a discussion

#FreelanceFocus: The Pomodoro technique

| Guides

Would you like to take a Pomodoro? In this instance I’m not asking you to accept a tomato, but instead enquiring as to whether you’d like to try a technique designed to improve your powers of concentration and increase the efficiency of your work.

As part of our Freelance Focus series, application designer Cesare Rocchi advises any freelancer who’s struggling to maintain their discipline and productivity to try out the Pomodoro technique…

Read more

5

13 small things to simplify your workday

| Lifestyle & Time out

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” ~Lao Tzu

One of the best things I did when I decided to simplify my life was to simplify my workday — first at my day job and later, by quitting my day job, in the work I do now as a writer and entrepreneur.

I’ve eliminated most of the routine, boring, administrative tasks with a few simple principles.

Read more

5

Getting Things Done: How NOT to Multitask

| Lifestyle & Time out

Single-tasking: getting more done by doing less.

Developing good, simple habits and maintaining a focused mind can not only help you stay sane but is way more efficient than multitasking.

Guest blogger and productivity-pro Leo Babauta tells why multitasking is bad and how we can avoid doing it.

Read more

16

Thinking inside the box: A method for focusing on freelance tasks

| Lifestyle & Time out

Getting things done throughout the day is what keeps the contracts and cash coming in. But how do we know which tasks we should be working on? And for how long? Freelance Advisor’s life-hacks guru Mark Kirby offers a smart solution to planning freelance work. In this post I’m going to focus on a simple [...]

Read more

12