When I’ve got an idea or a problem or a task or whatever, I write it down. After that it stares me in the face until I’ve taken action and either crossed it out or broken it down into smaller problems. This is how I generally work, but with a real physical notepad there’s the added incentive of it not going anywhere. No amount of saving or filing or minimising or compiling can stop it from sitting on my desk impetuously glaring at me while I do other things I shouldn’t be doing.

A notepad keeps you on your toes and reminds you what’s important.

It’s also a really useful multi-purpose tool. You can doodle on it in meetings, draw patterns and write silly things that dull the pain after someone tells you to implement a new BIOS firmware updater in HTML and CSS. You can even eat sandwiches off your notepad when there isn’t a plate handy, which I’d like to see you do with your iPad.

I only lament the notepad because now that I’m trying to work at home without one, I’m lost. I need to draw out a flowchart and all the digital tools are fiddly and irritating. Pen and paper may not have drop shadows and gradients, but it’s a lot more efficient and lets you get your ideas out faster. It’s a great workflow tool and the minute the shops open tomorrow I’m heading out to get myself a new one.

More (or less) free time

When you’re working for yourself, work ebbs and flows and it’s difficult to tell when you’re going to have everyone screaming for you at once. In the down time, you’re free to pursue personal projects.

It’s almost an embarrassing testament to how much money I’m making of late to note a number of personal projects I’ve been working on. I’ve recently finished my blog, my personal homepage, and even made a start on my new business site.

Flexible business hours rocks

I’m a major proponent of standard business hours, but of late I’ve been taking a late lunch break from work to get some exercise. I’ve decided to start cycling more regularly, and with flexible hours during the day this is a great way to stay fit and motivated.

My office phone automatically forwards to my mobile so I can take calls on the go, and email while important, will be there when I get back.

When an emergency strikes I’m at most half an hour away, and I find getting my exercise in the afternoon before the peak hour rush is a lot more enjoyable and motivating than battling traffic.

It’s common knowledge that diet and exercise are major contributors to mood and stress, and it’s especially important to stay focused when your success depends on yourself alone.

Every day is a new day

While brand management and public perception is an ongoing thing, every day (or every week at least) is essentially a new day to freelance in.

Every day brings a new contact, a new prospective client, a new discovery. There’s no such thing (or shouldn’t be such thing) as cublicle work when you’re contracting your services out.

The ebb and flow can be a stressful, taxing, and sometimes thoroughly depressing experience, but it’s not like that all the time. I just thought I’d write this to remind myself next time I’m feeling down and out in the freelancing game why things will always get better.

How often does a work project span over all of these:

1. Email
2. Instant Messages
3. Phone Conversation
4. Face-to-face meetings

As a freelancer, your productivity depends entirely on your own initiative. In an environment with so many distractions, and so many different ways of communicating, it’s difficult to keep up without appropriate productivity tools.

Email Productivity

While some would consider email an out of date technology, we still use it primarily for business communication. It’s lucky that these days email tools have kept up with the way we work.

If you’re using a hosted solution like Google Mail in your workplace, you’re in luck. Google can keep track of every message you send, and organise it hierarchically in a conversation format. The powerful search feature is also a blessing when you’re looking for something in particular, and can’t find it elsewhere.

If you’re still using a desktop client (and I’ll admit freely I am,) there’s still a few tricks you can use to keep on top.

• If you’re juggling projects, delegate each client their own folder. Set up rules to move incoming email to appropriate folders automatically. This will reduce clutter in your inbox, and divide your messages into manageable sections you can focus on as required.
• If you haven’t already, consider reading Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series, to keep your email account sorted and useful.

Task Management

Project management is a whole kettle of fish I’m not going to open here. As a freelancer, you should already be familiar with the basics of project management, so I’ll focus on a little trick I’ve learned recently.

Take Notes.

Especially when you’re dealing with multiple streams of information, taking notes can seriously reduce the amount of work you have to do later. I’ll often get five or six emails from a client before getting a clear picture as to what they actually want me to do, so referring back to all of these emails wastes a significant amount of time.

You might find that taking notes is initially a bit intimidating, but with a decent on-line or desktop note-taking application you can significantly reduce this stress.

My particular favourite application is Getting Things Gnome, which is a glorified to-do list. It lets me take down points a client makes in real time, and then check them off as they’re completed.

This kind of workflow significantly reduces the stress and frustration of sorting through old emails and instant messages to find answers to questions you’ve already asked.

Down Time

There’s no productivity tool like a holiday.

Sometimes it’s worthwhile to just take a break from your work, and unwind. If necessary, let your recurring clients know you’re taking a few days off, and go away.

Similarly, try not to work on the weekend at all. It’s difficult as a freelancer, because some clients use this time as an opportunity to get in contact you outside of their own work hours, but if you’re burning yourself out week-round, you’re not going to get anywhere. If you absolutely must, check your email once a day, but don’t get bogged down with the details.

Freelance work can be tricky to manage at times, but developing strategies to optimise your workflow and reduce managerial clutter really does help.

You’ve got all this time, with which you may only do one thing at once. You must apply your project management skills to finish everything you start within an arbitrary timeframe, and still designate “down time” so as to not burn yourself out.

Words of Experience

I think it’s steps one through ∞ in this scenario that I’m having the most trouble with. My personal, self-development projects end up running massively over time and often don’t even conclude.

Case in point: I’ve got one personal project I’ve been working on since the new year. It’s a pretty simple project, but it could supplement my incone by a few dollars a week. I don’t think I’ll ever recoup my initial outlay on it, but it would have been a great little portfolio piece.

I’ve got arguably the most important parts complete: The idea, the content, and the software set up, just waiting to go live. However I’ve still yet to come up with appropriate design and branding, which my perfectionist streak just can’t conclude.

I’ve got two other projects in the same state of perpetual incompleteness. Then there’s another four in a further state of disrepair, and I have a very bad habit of starting new projects on a whim.

Pixel Party

It seems as a web freelancer, your domain is the million or so pixels across the surface of the screen, and your free time is spent on devising new and interesting ways to fill them. As such, your entire life can tend to become one big project to manage, comprised of many smaller projects: personal and paid.

The problem with this model is twofold: Deadlines for personal projects are a lot more difficult to set, and managing your life so rigidly tends to get stressful. Setting milestones for personal achievements may be fine for some people, but for others it can become increasingly stressful as the randomness of life comes into play.

Mix up your management

Scheduling free time and setting realistic goals can help alleviate this problem, it but can’t do away with it entirely. Sometimes you just need some spontaneity; a day off, or a movie night.

To this end, it’s helpful to think in terms of units like “hours” or “days” instead of rigid dates for personal projects. Depending on your style, you can come up with any number of creative ways to measure the success of your non-critical projects. Using units you can see at a glance how a particular project is coming along, as well as revise your estimates as time goes by.

Using an unit-based system also has the added incentive of being able to compare the completeness of each project at a glance, so you’ll be more motivated to work on a project that’s nearing a milestone. It’s rewarding to be able to visualise how a project is coming along, whereas a deadline is a much more stressful metaphor.

If you’re a freelancer like me, and have trouble sorting your personal life appropriately, consider implementing a task management system like Getting Things Gnome, or adding modifications to your system. You’ll increase incentives, decrease stress, and notice you’re getting a lot more done.

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Slowly but surely we’ll be seeing changes take place. While the initial interoperability leg-work is done, there’s still a lot of stylin’ and organisation to go before I’ll label this site complete.

I’m using WordPress for the site now, which I’m sure the technical amongst you have heard of before. It’s the de-facto blogging software, but is a lot more powerful than it sounds. I’m confident it will be more than adequate for the goals I’ve got for the site.

So for the next few weeks things will be tweaked and improved. There’s a new theme coming slowly but surely, and any content that’s been missed out will be divided between here and ash.ms.

So lo begins the new era of Techtoucian Network. Subscribe to the new feed, and keep an eye out to see what’s happening.

I think the problem is that we’re trying to be a little too transparent with what we do. We’re offering the client too many options in our solutions, when all they necessarily want is to just “get a web site running”. The competing company around the corner have the philosophy of making the process of getting a web site as easy as it can possibly be, and even though their product might stink, their process is fantastic.

I’ve been idly musing over how to make our “project proposal” — the document that we use to judge if we’re on the same track as the client — a little easier to digest. Currently our standard one is about thirteen pages, chock full of facts, ideology, options and a fair amount of page breaks. While it’s all really important information, surely there has to be a way to condense it into something that is easier on the client.

Some good techniques that we’re already including involve using bullet points, tables, and short paragraphs to get our points across. Another good idea is to have a summary of what the document is trying to say at the start, so that the reader can get the facts straight up and then read on if they like.

I’m thinking that it would probably even be possible to separate our “proposal” into two sections; The first with the price, goals, what’s expected from the client and other proejcty stuff. The second document can be for more generic things like our policies, and an explanation of how things work. But the problem of having an enormous document to wade through isn’t solved by breaking it in half; there’s some important design considerations that need to be made.

We’re in the business of creating semantically rich, well formed, and generally high quality web solutions that make life easier. We should be expected to apply the same principles to our administration work too. My next project is to crack this usability barrier, and I’ll report back here with my results.