How to become a freelancer – Part 3

Today we will continue our series How to become a freelancer addressing a very important topic: Develop your Productivity and Mindset.

When a person can perform his tasks efficiently and nothing seems to take him out of his focus, we can say that this person possessed a Productive Mindset.

Mindset are mental attitudes, that is, the mentality or vision that each of us has in relation to life, and this influences how you organize your day to day life.

We, the freelancers, need to have a highly productive and ready mindset to undertake. If you can not get organized in your daily life, how much time will you have for a trip with the family or girlfriend, get a movie, travel, study, do your favorite hobby or take care of your health?

Let’s focus on those tools that will help you.

DEVELOP YOUR PRODUCTIVITY AND MINDSET

The following step-by-step guide for you to start developing your productive mindset:

FOLDER ORGANIZATION

Start by organizing your computer files into separate folders. Create a folder for each client and a subfolder for each part. Organize the sites in bookmarks, but all separated into folders, name categories. This makes it easier to find an important article or tutorial.

DAILY BACKUP

Keep a daily backup of everything you do. You can even store your data in Google Drive, which offers 15 GB of free space, and you have other options like OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud and Mega. This latter service option offers 50 GB of free storage.

FINANCIAL PLANNING

Use spreadsheets to track your expenses and earnings. You can create a simple spreadsheet in excel or free options like LibreOffice which also has excel spreadsheet software.

In addition to spreadsheets you can also opt for free online systems like quickbooks, which is a financial system, contains cash flow, reports and control of revenues and expenses. It is worth checking.

TASK MANAGEMENT

Have an agenda with annotated tasks. In addition to the pen and paper you can use free tools for task management, which are:

Trello (https://trello.com/)

Runrun.it (https://runrun.it)

Remember the milk (https://www.rememberthemilk.com/)

Asana (https://asana.com)

TIME MANAGEMENT

And in order not to lose focus while working, I suggest using two combined techniques:

• 1st – Organize your tasks in 1-3-5: Consists of listing your tasks in order of priority. 1 large task, 3 medium tasks and 5 simple tasks. This way you can prioritize the most important tasks.
• 2nd – Pomodoro Technique: This technique manages the productivity time, with it you can keep focus every 25 minutes with intervals of 5 minutes. Every 4 cycles you should take a longer break, between 15 and 30 minutes. These intervals are very important to rest.

To control time with the pomodoro technique you can access the site https://tomato-timer.com/.

CONCLUSION

These tools and techniques can help you manage time and organize your tasks, but avoid interruptions while working. Provide a work schedule and a schedule for the next day.

During the execution of the tasks avoid seeing whatSapp, answering emails, chewing on facebook, etc …

All these things can take away your focus and concentration. Spend a few minutes of the day to answer emails, view facebook posts and other little things that can get in your way. You can do this as the first task of the day by stipulating a half-hour, and then focusing on the most important tasks.

If you want to know what your own style of productivity, access this link (http://lpprodutividade.com.br/blog/work-simply-teste-productividade-personal/) and make a simple test.