Announcement: FreelancerMagazine and NorthxEast.com to Merge

I am pleased to announce that NorthxEast.com and FreelancerMagazine.com will soon be merging and operating as one site. Our combination unites two complementary resources, with NxE aimed at providing advice and resources for independent bloggers, and FM providing additional resources on marketing, productivity, self-management, and more.
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Open thread: How to get things done?!

We previously chatted about finding inspiration. Now we shall talk about getting things done. Not the actual book, but about what all of us do in order to move forward in our projects.

I am a mac user, and I use calendar app a lot. I have a couple (7 actually) different calendars, ranging from business tasks, to deadlines and personal plans. This has helped me stay on track with what I do, and make extensive plans up to almost 2 weeks ahead.

However, this didn’t work quite well, and just after this last Easter I ended up on the first working day with about 40 tasks to complete. That was obviously way to much I could handle, even if I had 10 employees. I ended up with those 40 tasks because I usually planned for each day much more than I could do. At the end of each day, all uncompleted tasks were postponed to the next day. In the long term, this technique proved very bad, but I switched it upside down.

Now, I pushed all my tasks to the end of the next week, picked the most important 5 of them, and moved them on the to-do list for today. Having the pressure off my shoulders, it turned out that all those 5 tasks were completed a couple of hours before my “working time” for today was over. I then looked and checked the next important task in the long list that was pushed to the next week. I did that task too, and repeated the process. When I finished work, and started writing this article, I realized I have finished 9 tasks, as opposed to 5 or 6 with my previous technique.

I think I got better results because I didn’t look ahead and try to multi-task. So, how do you do it?

26 Useful Tips and Tricks for Freelancers

Freelancing is by no means easy. You are given responsibility of your own future, your own earnings, to choose who and what you want to work for; but this responsibility comes with a whole set of unique challenges in itself. You’re in charge of your own future, so if you make a mistake, you’re the only one to blame. You dictate your earnings, so it’s up to you to hunt down clients and make sure you’ve got a consistent cash flow. These are but a few of typical freelancer’s worries.

So how do we tackle these challenges? Well, put your seat-belt because we’re about to go through an entire list of ‘26 Useful Tips and Tricks for Freelancers’.

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