How to stop procrastinating when you’re working as a freelancer
By TRISOFT team
One of the challenges of a freelancer is being able to focus at all times. Given the more versatile work environment — your own home, an outdoor space, a cozy cafe — your distractions will be completely different from those in an office. It’s true that you won’t have a boss breathing down your neck, meetings and phones ringing around your desk, but you will have social media, e-mails, unexpected personal calls and visits or your friends and family having you run errands, since “you’re at home anyway”.
So let’s explore a few great ways to cope with distractions and master the art of self-discipline while discovering which are, one by one, an entrepreneur’s biggest enemies when it comes to procrastination.
What’s keeping you distracted?
A good start on your way to discovering how to best handle your distractions is to actually know your distractions. Everyone kind of knows their poison — Facebook, YouTube, e-mails — but it is important to identify how much of your time you’re wasting on each and how much time you’re left to work.
One idea would be to use a time tracking/productivity application, such as Hive to help you figure out how long you spend on each app and how productive you really are at the end of the day. We are working hard to make Hive into your best ally for the job, so we are designing it to monitor computer usage, track personal productivity and generate reports. This way, among all the other cool features, Hive will also help you figure out where to start when you want to draw some restrictive lines in your daily work. In the meantime, you can try RescueTime or TimeDoctor, two apps that follow just about the same principles.
Block the noise
Now that you know what’s causing you to lose focus, you can go on and cut them one by one. Luckily, there are a bunch of highly effective tools that will block your online distractions and make you get back to your work faster.
For Windows
FocalFilter and Cold Turkey do exactly what their names suggests, filtering and blocking applications and websites on a schedule that you can set in advance. Depending on your procrastinating habits, you can program these apps to block your most feared distractions during certain hours or even for the whole day, if you need to. However, you need to keep in mind that once you start the clock you won’t be able to go back and undo what you have decided to block (for that specific amount of time). At least not very easily ;)
Leechblock and StayFocusd are two free Web-browser extensions which enable you to block access to time-wasting websites. Leechblock works for Firefox, while StayFocusd goes with Chrome and both of them have a complete lockdown option, for in case of emergency you’re-on-the-worst-deadline-ever situations.
For Mac
SelfControl is for Mac only and as opposed to Freedom, no amount of restarting your computer will cancel the time set for blocking your undesired temptations.
Concentrate, on the other hand, will allow you to shift between various tasks, depending on your activities. Say if you want to write an article, you can set up Concentrate on this assignment and it will automatically block the websites and apps that you are not bound to use, while at the same time open for you those which it believes will be helpful.
You can block the social websites that are killing your focus with Anti-Social, which is kind of like a lighter version of Freedom, enabling you to only target and block those apps that you select as dangerous to your productivity.
For both Windows and Mac
Freedom is a Mac, Windows and Android compatible tool, that for 10$ will allow you to completely cut off access to the Internet for a specified period of time. There is no grey area with Freedom, so if you want to go online for anything (including work related) you will need to reboot your computer.
A few simple extra tips
When your major distractions come from the online area, the blocking apps above will provide you safety of mind. However, you can’t only rely on these to do the whole job. So here are a few extra tips that will help you stay focused for a longer amount of time.
First of all, try muting your smartphone. Of course, it would be best to turn it off, but since we all know how hard that is ☺, muting it will do just fine.
Secondly, organize your free time better. Don’t work until you break, just schedule a few breaks throughout the day, as many as it makes you feel comfortable and relaxed.
Also, it might feel a tad difficult to go on an Internet-freeze after being used to freely browse on Facebook or YouTube, so do your best to be constant, even if it’s for a few hours a day at first. Go step by step and you’ll slowly grow into it.
However, the Internet is not the only distraction out there. There’s also personal chords, boredom or the urge to have a snack every few hours. Try this magic trick: change your environment. Clear your desk and the room you work in of food, pets, noisy electronics or other sorts of forbidden fruit.
Blocking apps go well with self-discipline
After all, being effective will not remain a matter of which application you chose to block your distractions. These are supposed to only give you incentives, but the real trick is for you to be disciplined enough to use them wisely and wish to learn how to be more productive with each new project.
Conclusion
Studies on the subject show that a wandering mind keeps happiness wandering as well. As we all know, one of the fundamental principles of productivity is that in order to get things done, you need to focus. Looking up from your desk, there are so many of ways to procrastinate. You could go out for a walk; you could check your phone for texts or emails; you could get something to eat or another cup of tea; or you could check Instagram, Linkedin and Facebook. It’s a battle freelancers out there fight every day.
But it’s not hard to fight if you have the proper tools — a few smart apps and a whole lot of will power and ambition will make you into a neat, professional entrepreneur that every company will be lucky to work with.
At TRISOFT, we trust tools and apps to make our work more efficient, but mostly we trust the people who use them to make it more productive. And also, we have this philosophy to make the most not only of our working time, but of our free time as well.
