2 Simple Ways to Keep Track of Time while Freelancing?

The way people used to work and manage themselves is evolving with the changing work habits. The unconventional workforce has its privileges and the potential to create job opportunities. However, when there is no one around to supervise, you sometimes become laid back in completing the gig till another day and it may badly affect your income, reputation, and growth as a freelancer. You must manage your time in an efficient manner to leverage the most out of the opportunities at hand.

As a freelancer time is equivalent to money, being an enterprise in oneself freelancers are required to manage their time effectively to optimize their performance and earnings. If a freelancer cannot measure the time, then he cannot know his worth. Before signing up for any project it is crucial that the freelancer analyze and evaluate that how much time the project will take to complete and how much effort will go into the project completion. For new freelancers, however it is a difficult task, but to stay in business and succeed, understanding time and its value are vital.

How Time Management Can Make a Difference?

As a freelancer, things that matter are your skills but to utilize your skills, your time management skills must be optimum. It does not matter if you are a content writer that is creating ideas and jotting them down or a graphic designer in charge to respond ideas through images, graph, infographics, and art, or even a web designer who creates corporate websites or fashion blogs. Whatever your skills are, as a freelancer time tracking must be your priority. It is crucial otherwise achieving your goal within the deadline will become a nightmare.

So, to make your life a less hectic and more organized; and to help you out in completing more gigs in less time, here are two simple approaches.

1. Go Traditional — Measure Your Work

No matter what your skills are and in what field you work, the best way to leverage your time and skills is to measure your work like a pro. Whenever there is a gig available that you wish to bid for, ask yourself two questions:

a) Is the project budget worth it?

b) Is the project can be done within the set time limit?

Both questions are interrelated and worth your time for a critical evaluation as they will help you better gauge your capabilities and manage your work in an efficient and effective manner.

• If a project deadline is unrealistic with respect to your capabilities and speed then it does not matter what the budget may be, it is better to let it go than bagging a negative review and an incomplete order history in your portfolio.
• If the project budget is low and the time deadline is satisfactory but you think you can earn more by taking on other short projects, then again it is time to let the project go by and focus on something that is worth your time and effort.

However, if you are a newcomer in the freelance industry then low budget may not matter much as in the start earning your first few orders and reviews is a challenge.

1.1 Set Your Milestone

The next step after you take on a gig after evaluating if it can be done or not is setting up your own milestone as per the time limit set by the client. Break the gig into segments and the timeline into chunks such as hours, days or weeks depending on the nature of gig you have undertaken. Try to accomplish your set milestones in the set time limit to ensure the completion of the project. Planning your work strategically will help you not only in completing your task on time, but it will also help you stay stress-free.

2. Be Techy in Your Time Management

Since it is the era of technology, life has made much easier with the innovative gadgets and applications. As a freelancer, you can also use technology to track your time in a better way. Today, everyone has a smartphone, laptop or tablet. Using productive apps on your gadgets will help you increase your productivity as an individual.

For instance, let’s say you are a freelance content writer, who take up writing gigs to earn and meet ends. One day, you took up a gig of writing a technical paper, you spent all your time in searching and collecting information; being lost in your data collection you end up using most of your time from the predefined time limit. With so little time left, chances are you may fail to produce a satisfactory quality technical paper on time or fail to submit anything anyway; leaving you stranded with no payment and wastage of a fair amount of time that you could have used working on something productive.

2.1 Be Smart with Time Tracking Apps

Now consider the same gig, but a different approach where you have made use of some good applications (mobile or computer) that allow you to not just to track time spent on task but to make an invoice to your clients accordingly.

With any time tracking and management app, you can easily achieve goals by making a schedule to get it done before a deadline. To make schedule mostly days are marked but time tracking apps will help you to keep track of each second that you spend on given task, tag projects, create reports and export to an invoicing tool. There are many free apps for time tracking that will help you out such as harvest, toggle, everhour, time IQ and timely.

2.2 Be Creative — Follow Both Approaches

To be the time management guru while freelancing, you can incorporate both approaches (traditional and technological). It will help you to better manage your projects and earn your set income without any hurdles and setbacks.

The freelance and on-demand economy are growing at a rapid pace and it has the potential to create opportunities to end the recession, however, there are no surefire ways available to leverage from this growing industry. GigTricks, world’s first integrated 360-degree ecosystem is launching with a sole purpose to offer a platform where all freelancer and entrepreneurs will have a fair chance at growth and success.

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