Categories: Career

Pro Tips for Freelancers to be Hyper Productive

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The number of freelancers worldwide has been growing significantly in recent years. This has been driven by the rise in digital technology, the number of online platforms that offer job matching, the financial crisis, and the work-life balance that freelance jobs provide.

The distribution of professional work is constantly changing, with changes driven by advancing techniques and information flows. According to international estimates, in 2006 already about 19.1% of all “knowledge workers” engaged in freelancing, commissioning, and interim management.

As of 2024 this number skyrocketed to 38% of workforce with an estimated 64 million freelance workers nationwide in the US. That results in a lot of competition and a reason to make sure you’re working as efficiently as you can to satisfy and impress clients!

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Creating a Productive Workspace

Designate a specific spot at home for work. You don’t need a separate room with locked doors, but a defined space will help you to shift your mindset to the workplace when you’re “at work”. Consider a few things when choosing your base of operation: it should be quiet or at least relatively so, it should have enough light and all the electrical outlets that you need, and it should be clean and uncluttered.

As much clutter as possible really should go. Clutter-filled rooms and cluttered desks are distracting. Also, be sure your “office” chair is both comfortable and offers good support. You’ll be sitting in that chair for hundreds or thousands of hours in a year. It’s worthwhile to invest in a proper ergonomic chair, or even an ergonomic desk setup. If you are in for the long haul, office furniture – especially a high-quality desk and chair – is usually worth the spending money.

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Always dress for work. Working from home allows you to dress casually, no doubt about it, but wearing “real” clothes is a small trick to mentally prepare yourself for the work that needs to be done. When you’re dressed crisply, you will often work with more focus and lessening of distractions.

You face work with more control. The fresh clothes you slip into can serve as a sort of trigger for a cortisol boost. You should be dressed just as if you were going to leave home to head to work.

If you want to learn even more on this topic, you gotta check out my book on “How to Start a Successful Freelance Career”! Plus the ebook is on sale right now for just $2.99 on Amazon!

Even now that many of us are dressing more casually all the time, small, physical cues like getting dressed can help to make that shift into work mode, or to dial those feelings of separation up just a bit more. It turns out that your daily work-from-home routine can be disrupted if you dress the same way.

When you dress the same for work and leisure, you mix today and the future, which can affect your strategy. The working day becomes more artificial when wearing work clothes, which can increase your work productivity because the level of separation keeps you focused.

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Establishing a Routine and Boundaries

Understanding freelancing as a profession would help to shape beneficial work ethics and other routines. Because freelancers earn based on completed work, as opposed to the number of hours worked, a flexible schedule approach is implemented. In actuality, successful freelancers believe that one of the most crucial work habits would be an established routine.

Punctuality should be a frequent attribute, as clients and projects place varying requirements on freelancers. Furthermore, working a few scheduled hours daily would promote a healthier balance between work time and leisure. People who have too much free time without a lot of structure or routine often find themselves unfocused and less productive.

Beginning and ending the workday at the same time would make balancing work and a personal life simpler. As it is, working from home already possesses its set of negative images associated with it, like the concept of never being able to leave the office. In order to be productive, it is crucial to respect business hours far from personal commitments.

Suppose family and friends were aware of the hours you were available and those of non-availability. In that case, it would be easier to maximize free time to share with loved ones. Small interruptions being minimized by informing others of your business schedule would be a great reason to stick to a timetable.

Any scheduled break should be adhered to strictly as well, and those hours – that are dedicated to leisure and family time – should be embraced. Typifying behaviors that should be maintained both at home and at the workplace is an additional crucial part of maintaining a consistent routine.

Utilizing Time Management Techniques

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As a freelancer, you do not have traditional office hours, but you do have a due date on your work, and you should have a realistic work plan that allows you to complete and submit that task on time. Every day is a working day for purposeful freelancers who churn out work with consistent ability.

Your most important work tool subsequently becomes time. You are not only the staff, the intern, and the floor warden. You are the manager, and you must work responsibly with every minute so that you can complete the job at hand. Work does not wait for you. You chase it, catch it, and then complete it within your delivery time frame.

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Good time management is what separates successful freelancers from mediocre ones with the same skill set. They recognize the worth of every moment and are not just minding time but maximizing it. You must discipline yourself and stay focused on productivity while working from home.

Remember that time is the most perishable commodity, because it does not stop for anyone. There are no bank savings for time or lockers where you can deposit moments. You can only run around trying to save time, because once lost, it is gone forever. If you do not work intentionally you will leave windows open for everyday deterrence to heist your precious time.

Watching television for hours, recreational web surfing, long telephone conversations, long grocery shopping trips at 11 am when you should be working, and other avoidable home distractions. Smart work for freelancers does not happen by chance; it happens by choice.

Maintaining Work-Life Balance

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Creating a tangential workspace at home is essential to maintaining work-life balance. This is the most important portion of the day because it requires you to think from one frame of mind and switch it into another.

It is not fair to your boss or clients who are paying you if you are doing personal work when you should be on the clock. As a freelancer, your clients are paying you for a devotion to their projects. When you are not 100% focused on their project, the client is not getting their money’s worth.

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Mentally, every task you do helps draw attention to its framing, and the most framing activities win. This is what researchers call “salience”, the greatest consideration, time, and mental processing will go to the area with the greatest salience. This means that work tasks will grab all the attention, and you can easily work until midnight without realizing it.

Personal tasks have to be just as salient so that personal life does not lose out. This will keep work and personal time balanced. The better you are at managing your work and personal time, the more you will appreciate the sense of freedom that comes between the balancing act of the two.

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Elizabeth Richey
About the Author: Elizabeth Richey, living and thriving in rural Arkansas, Aquarian and iced coffee enthusiast. When she’s not writing, gardening, playing with her chocolate lab Maple or sharing videos on YouTube (Elizabeth’s Many Adventures) you can find her enjoying time with her family or traveling somewhere new! Most of the time she’s dreaming of being kicked back in her hammock in her cottage garden listening to the birds sing.

Categories: Career

How I made $85,000 my second year freelancing

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Today I want to share with you how I was able to ALMOST double my income year two in freelance, after having made $55,000 my first year and then shocking even my own self when I made $85,000 in 2020, among covid.

Hi, I’m Elizabeth and I do freelance bookkeeping and forensic accounting and if you’re new here, I have another article explaining how I got into freelancing and exactly how my first year went and you can find that article here if you’d like that backstory!

To jump in today’s enthralling content, I want to focus on year two. To start with, I’ve always been a goal setter and I do a tedious amount of planning, foreshadowing, dreaming, daydreaming, etc. I think all of these things are great benefits to actually helping you get across the finish line!

Client Retention

One factor as to how I made $85,000 my second year freelancing, is realizing in a business where your gross monthly income exactly equates to not only how much work you’ve accomplished but also how happy your clients are, client RETENTION is #1! You want to keep each and every one of those clients you worked so hard to win! You started out in a sea of thousands competing and you landed the client and you did the work. But KEEPING that client can sometimes be as hard as getting it.

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A tip for client retention is to treat them like family, not that toxic family you only see on holidays but the ones you love who make you feel warm and fuzzy. You want to handle what they’ve hired you to handle but you also want to ask about their day, their life, their personal life, their spouse, kids, etc. Take the time on work calls to just be a human for a moment and check in, human to human. By taking the time to do that regularly, you are forging a personal relationship that isn’t only professional and you are not just a purely replaceable person to them. Over time, you become a friend to them and they value you and your work even more.

Fortitude

As in, don’t be so quick to give up when you don’t get instant gratification! Today in our modern society we are bogged down by false idols on social media and the instant gratification of growing up with the internet and cell phones. When you do freelance you are operating YOUR OWN BUSINESS. RUNNING A BUSINESS IS NOT EASY. Granted, we have days that things go great, the to do list rapidly shrinks, we complete work from the beach via laptop while on vacay, we can pay off large debts and travel in luxury.

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But most of the time, we have our heads down focusing on work. When we aren’t focused on being productive and getting the actual work done, you’re MANAGING your business by invoicing clients, following up, networking, looking for new clients, checking in on goals, financial planning, goal setting, etc.

How I made $85,000 my second year freelancing is because I had the gumption to not give up! So you aren’t going to make it as a freelancer turned business owner if you don’t have the personal FORTITUDE to push through the hard stuff and put in the real work!

Quality over Quantity

Another tip on how I made $85,000 my second year freelancing is that I chose quality over quantity! Since I’m coming to work everyday facing my emails, taking calls and scheduling zooms as if each client is a dear friend or family member, I’m taking my time to do what I was hired to do…WELL! I tune out distractions, I take my job seriously, I take each task seriously whether it takes 5 minutes or 2 hours.

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Not only do I offer my clients superior service and a quality of work but in that same regard I value quality customers over having a huge customer list. There have been times I had opportunities to grow my firm but I just didn’t have the capacity to expand at that time. I knew if I tried to force it it’d only cause me additional stress and I might not be able to provide that same superior level of service, so I didn’t do it. So rather than focusing on having 10 clients, if you have 8 AMAZING clients, be good with that for now until it’s easier to scale, when the time feels better to do so!

But if you want to learn even more on this topic, you gotta check out my book that recently launched! Plus the ebook is on sale right now for just $2.99 on Amazon!

After 4+ years in freelance and growing a successful small firm that has made over 6 figures multiple years in a row, I wrote a book! I wanted to help other people who feel trapped by the 9-5, who yearn for time freedom, or who have a creative skill they’ve been wishing they could turn in a full time gig!

So being as I’ve been a writer since I was a pre-teen, I wanted to share everything I learned in written form, to try to reach as many people as possible! You don’t have to be a mom, don’t have to be 34, you could be a 19 year old young man or even a 60 year old woman looking to supplement income!

The thing is, if you’re looking for some time and financial freedom, then you should give this book a read because what do you have to lose? It’s less than $10 and will likely take you less than 3 hours to read cover to cover and best case, you’ve learned amazing new skills and tips on how to hit the races running!

You can check out my book on Amazon here, it’s a very quick read!

If you’re just curious though and not ready to commit, I’d like to offer you the first 5 chapters of my book for free when you opt in to join my reader newsletter! You can find the link on my website https://booksbyelizabethrichey.com/ on how to sign up with just your email and then the pdf of the book will be emailed to you! If you go this route, please do let me know what you think of it!

Review from Amazon

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and if so why not give me a follow or subscribe, as I’m always sharing more about great places to eat, Airbnb recommendations, traveling, health tips, recipes and more! Thanks for the read!

If you’d like to read my personal story, you can find it here!

xoxo,

Elizabeth Richey

About the Author: Elizabeth Richey, living and thriving in rural Arkansas, Aquarian and iced coffee enthusiast. When she’s not writing, gardening, playing with her chocolate lab Maple or sharing videos on YouTube (Elizabeth’s Many Adventures) you can find her enjoying time with her family or traveling somewhere new! Most of the time she’s dreaming of being kicked back in her hammock in her cottage garden listening to the birds sing.

Categories: Career

How to replace a day job with freelancing!

In this article I want to share with you how I was able to launch a successful freelance career, how to replace a day job with freelancing, and start a whole new adventure for myself and my family!

Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I started a new career at 34, transitioning from real estate to bookkeeping because I stumbled upon it and I was really good at it! I educated myself on everything I needed to learn about one software platform and really just dove in. Now I made numerous mistakes along the way and I ended up writing a book about HOW I did all these things and what all I learned, but more on that later!

In 2020 I was working a full time job as an accountant with a decent salary in rural Arkansas ($55,000 a year) and I also had full health benefits and retirement, which is something I hadn’t had for over 10+ years due to my real estate career. It was the stability I’d been looking for for awhile but I quickly realized that 1 40 hours a week job did not work for my personality.

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So I really wanted to learn more about how to replace a day job with freelancing. Because my biggest issue was that I could get that entire job done in about 20 hours a week and the rest of the time I had to sit in my office and pretend I was working. The first few months of that I took more and more classes online to further my education. I have always loved learning so this was something I always gravitated towards. But after awhile I just felt like I could be doing so much more. I realized that I could be making MORE money, helping more people, utilizing these skills I’d learned.

Client #1 was a word of mouth referral. I met them in the halls of my original day job and they had already heard everybody singing my praises of how I’d come in and cleaned up messy books and he asked me if I could clean up his books evenings and weekends around my day job and I said absolutely.

So I did just that and sat out on weekends primarily to work on his books which worked well for me because he knew I had a full time day job and he wasn’t expecting me to complete anything super quickly. That client told someone else about what I had done for him and recommended another local company to me. This was pre-covid so people were shocked I could work remotely from home and still help solve their problems while not costing as much in overhead.

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By this point I had done or completed 3 successful projects/clients within this same new niche and I felt confident to go online to my freelancer profile on Upwork and add my new skill set. And boy did a whole new adventure begin!

Within 3 months of having this new skill listed on Upwork I had a found more new clients. I had found the budding sucess on how to replace a day job with freelancing. Now I didn’t sit around those few months. I was working my existing clients, my day job AND constantly looking for new clients on Upwork and applying to opening position. In the beginning it seemed like 90% I’d never even get an interview for. But with a newer freelancer profile and less experience, you have to really earn your way in the trenches and just don’t ever give up because each month it gets easier!

By month 4 I was making MORE than my regular take home salary and I made the choice to lose the health benefits, lose the stability, and go out on my own full time! I launched my LLC then, in June I believe and was off to the races.

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I feel like the biggest reason I had continual success comes down to a few solid factors:

I had monthly and yearly goals and regularly checked in with myself. These were clearly defined, monetary goals in gross monthly income as well as number of clients.

I stuck with it day in and day out, whether I had a good day or not.

I treated my clients like my best friends. I was genuinely good to them, I was not just professional but I wanted to make them feel like family and I would say half of my client list now are clients I’ve had from my first year in business. So when you treat people like family AND successfully perform the job they hired you to do, or continually solve the problem they need you to solve, you will retain the client!