“I feel so stressed and stretched out”
“I am always overwhelmed with the amount of tasks I need to do”
“I don’t have any social life because I have enormous deadlines and targets to meet”
“It seems like my attention is being pulled from all sides”
These and many more are phrases and sentences we often times tell ourselves or to another person especially while ranting or complaining. We don’t usually find where our time runs off to. 24 hours in a day and it’s not even enough to do and cover much.
How do you manage time and deadlines? How do you maintain a work-life balance? Would you have to complete some work and leave some unattended to? It would be detrimental to your craft and brand if as a freelancer you take advantage of your extreme work flexibility.
Time management is one of the skills of self-management. Self-management is the ability to prioritize goals, decide on what must be done and be accountable to complete the necessary actions. Time management requires that you plan how much time you have to spend on a task.
Time management skills tips or the 3 skills required to effectively manage your time would include:
 Awareness/Consciousness of your time
 Scheduling/Arrangement of tasks
 Adaptation/Prioritization
The understanding and consciousness that time is limited gives you a sense of urgency in apportioning time to different tasks and also helps prevent procrastination.
It is important that you set personal goals and prioritize them in their order of importance and or deadlines. You can start by making it a daily to do list of action plans to achieve those goals and then broaden it to weekly and further more to monthly, depending on the deadline fixed for the task or project. Now, as easy as this sounds to do, it would be difficult to follow through your action plans or to do list if you are not disciplined.
Most freelancers do not have the capacity to say no to some job offers or some distractions that do not yield results beneficial to their work even when they have so many other projects on their desks, some problems they confront includes dealing with scheduling conflicts, prioritizing client demands, and deciding how to use (or not use) their time. This makes their work choked up and leads to ineffectiveness and also poorly executed projects. Learn to draw the end line or boundaries to how much tasks you can take up in a day, week or month.
Take note of your most active and less active time in a day and move the biggest tasks to your most active time of the day. Consider delegating your tasks or projects, I know it can be a difficult thing to do especially when you don’t want to share the percentage of the revenue coming in through that tasks with someone else. Outsourcing or delegating jobs would lighten your workload and drives your focus on some other pressing tasks.
Perfectionism doesn’t exit so avoid going back and forth on a particular task, you would end up being super unproductive. Do not for any reason think that you would cover ground by multitasking, it only makes you unproductive, you end up starting different projects but not finishing any.
Focus is a great skill that should be practiced daily, this means you avoid all distractions like casually being on social media or other activities.
By all means pour yourself a drink after each milestone!

BY
Sharon Ejindu
Digital Marketer, Copywriter & Content creator
(PoDlancer)
www.podlancer.com
(The best site for freelancers, do well to visit and register as a freelancer or as a client)