Freelance Apple

If you believed that God did not give the ability to mankind to create time, then you need to think again. Often many people see time as something which we are bound by, a dimension which controls us and shapes our universe. You would be perfectly right to believe this, but you are not as bound as you think.

There are ways of creating time in your day which leads you to the ultimate goal of time management – spending time with your loved one’s. If I had the ability to create time, I would make myself a few days to spend solely with the most beautiful thing in the world – my precious daughter. We are restricted by time but we do have the ability to organise our time such that we literally create time.

In this article I will discuss some crafty tricks which all freelancers can try in order to make more hours in the day. This is part of our ‘Productivity Week’ here on FreelanceApple until 9th March so be sure to be coming back for more useful content by subscribing to our RSS.

Where does time go?

The sad thing about time is that the last hour which you spent before reading this article will never come back, unlike when you lose money which can be replaced at some stage, time can never be replaced. This reflects the enormity of time management, as every hour we near our doom or more optimistically, every hour we near our success in freelancing.

If you read ‘Freelancer’s Time Analysis’ and carried out the action points you should be able to see a pattern by now. (Be sure to read this article as it describes a thorough technique of time analysis where you make a not of what you are doing every fifteen minutes). There will be things which you were doing every fifteen minutes which sound absurd.

When I have trained people previously and used this method, I found that the most common things people are shocked at are the length of time they spend:

• Watching TV/Youtube/Facebook
• On the phone to someone
• Sleeping
• Sitting idle
• Shopping

For those of you who tried the fifteen minute checker, you will have seen similarly shocking results. So what is the solution? You may expect me to say “stop doing the above” but it is not so simple.

How to genuinely create time

I mentioned an alarming fact previously during productivity week, which was that on average a normal American will waste up to two hours looking for something or due to lack of concentration/energy and by being unprepared for meetings or other pending issues.

A simple basic solution is to use Steven Covey’s four quadrant To-do list. This does not necessarily ‘create’ time however. In the four quadrant system there is a ‘Not Important’ section. Regarding all of the tasks which you tell yourself are to be done and are ‘not important’, why do them at all? If something is not important it is not benefiting you and there are no consequences for not doing it nor any reward for doing it. Why would you do such a thing? By not doing the ‘Not Important’ section, you have created time. Ask yourself why something is on your to-do list, what is the goal, why will it help you succeed, and soon enough you will be creating more time.

There are several other ways of creating time. If you correctly file every single document on your desk and around your room into a filing cabinet, when you need to access a receipt or a document you will not be going through your garbage and screaming and swearing at yourself. No, rather you will find it simply and will have saved yourself the time of looking for the file.

The same applies for your computer. It is mandatory that you have nothing on your desktop and that you organise everything correctly into correctly labelled folders. I would go as far to say don’t delete anything and store it on an external hard-drive so that no matter what happens you will have access to files and wont lose sleep when trying to find a deleted file.

Try having a paper recycling bin, so that you never throw a piece of paper away, should the worst case scenario happen, you will be able to access ‘that receipt’ and not look endlessly and whine regarding it.

Regarding email I believe the same applies. You should not have ANYTHING in your inbox. It should all be filed away into appropriate folders in your inbox. Don’t delete emails, you may need them one day (unless they say “Free Viagra” or “pics of Cheryl Cole naked” in which case delete asap, because it is spam and probably a virus!)

The final point I will mention is distractions, but I have an upcoming article in which I will discuss this in detail. Generally speaking, one distraction lasts on average around 6 minutes and it will take around 5 minutes to get back into what you are doing, so 5 distractions will cost you an hour. Reduce distractions by any means necessary.

Action Points

Now that you can see from above how to create time, start organising everything in your office. Make sure there is a proper system in place which ensures that you know where every paper is and can access it within minutes. Organise your computer’s files and sort out all your inboxes for all your email accounts. Finally subscribe to FreelanceApple’s RSS so you know what to do next.

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