How to organise your creative freelance business to be more productive

24 Jul

Running your own creative freelance business is an exciting prospect and comes with a whole host of benefits. You get to turn your creative passion into your living, for one. However, when it comes to growing your business, it’s important to employ organisational skills alongside channelling that creative energy.

If you’re looking to manage your time, energy, and resources more effectively, explore these organisation tips.

Set working hours

One of the perks of being a creative business owner is that you can work at a time that suits your lifestyle. This flexibility is all well and good but inconsistency can lead to peaks and troughs in your productivity. You may also find that you never fully ‘switch off’ and end up doing bits of work throughout the day and evening.
By setting start and finish times, you can ensure you focus fully within those hours and relax outside of them.

Find your most productive time of day

Linking to the point above, it can be helpful to identify when your productivity is highest and set your working hours then. Are you an early bird who’s most motivated in the morning? Or a night owl?

By matching your schedule with your most productive hours, you’ll minimise procrastination.

Create daily to-do lists

Do you find that you have an overwhelming range of different tasks to complete each day? Writing a to-do list can help you organise your thoughts and prioritise effectively.
You might like to try Brian Tracy’s **ABCDE method**.

This involves writing out everything you need to do for the day (ahead of time) and assigning each one a letter: A being the highest priority, B the next most important, and so on.

Tracy also suggests getting your most challenging or daunting task done first — he calls this “eating the frog.”

Focus on one task at a time

Once you have your to-do list, it can be tempting to multitask. Perhaps you have admin to do, want to keep your social media platforms up to date, and need to add products to your Etsy page. Skipping between jobs can sometimes feel more productive than it actually is.

Try focusing on one thing at a time. Completely ticked off tasks are more satisfying than having a handful of partially-completed jobs.

Set yourself deadlines

Chances are, you have deadlines of some form already — whether that’s submitting a design proposal to a client or posting orders to a customer. But creating additional deadlines can also improve your organisation and time management.
Why not try setting yourself a due date for your social media drafts so you can schedule them ahead of time? This will mean you have a batch ready to go and won’t need to worry about creating fresh content all the time.
Deadlines can help you feel prepared and allow you time to review your work.

Delegate tasks

If you work in a small team, it can be helpful to share the workload. Take a look at your to-do list and work out which jobs need to be done by you and which ones you can delegate to others.

Consider hiring a virtual assistant.

Perhaps you’re a solopreneur or you don’t have the resources to hire a team to help with tasks. A virtual assistant could offer the support you need. Whether you want somebody to take general admin off your hands or you could benefit from some social media expertise, hiring a virtual assistant (VA) can be a cost-effective way to boost your creative business’s productivity.

They can help you get through your to-do list so you can focus on your areas of expertise.