How to Organise Freelancer’s Work from Home.

Thomas Simon

I want to talk about a more general topic that concerns all freelancers in general, is how to organize your workplace and how to work at home.

This topic does not seem difficult, but  sometimes is quite painful when you switch to freelance for the first time, I think there are two scenarios.

• It seems to you that you have a lot of free time, and work is getting  postponed.
• Or vice versa you start working non-stop and without weekends.

My scenario in the beginning was the second and with such work I quickly started to burn out , now I will tell you about my principles, which I use when working from home and what I came to after a few years. Sometimes it seems that working at home is the best thing, you can imagine sleeping as long as you want, you don’t waste time on the road and you are always in your comfortable home environment, but on the other hand in reality it turns out so, that the work surrounds you from all sides –  you make breakfast at the same time answering your mail, fall asleep  with your computer, and even a weekend can be busy talking to the customer, from such work can quickly burn out, if you do not properly organize your work time and space. If you are already working as a freelancer, you may have noticed that after a while, even though you began to spend less time on the work itself, because you do not need to spend any more time on the road, but for some reason you began to get more tired, the house ceased to be home, and the work did not end .

Your brain ceased to understand boundaries between work and rest and stopped resting, even at the proper time. If we talk about freelancers, we either wait for the gig to start, and this is a psychologically very expensive process, or we do the job, but our brain did not understand that the job ended because after we closed one window opened  another and started looking for something else on the Internet, maybe on the working topics, but the brain still did not understand the difference.

And so today I would like to talk about the main points to consider if you decide to go freelance and work from home.

First is to organize your workplace. Ideally, your workspace should not intersect with your personal space – that is, you do not sleep, do not eat, do not rest where you work and vice versa, even if your apartment has very limited space, try to allocate yourself this separate work area. Of course, it is ideal that you have a separate office for this purpose, but even if it does not work this way, try to delimit your territory somehow,

If you take my room then it is also quite small, but it is separated by a rack and there is where the sleeping area, there is a bed and there I only sleep here I have a sofa and here I rest watching TV, reading and here I have a desk here I directly work and spend their lessons and nothing else I do not do here.

So try to find your place too, where you can only work with the site. Try to find a place at home, too, where you only work and nothing else would distract you from this business. Also very important is the furniture in your work area because the furniture is the basis of your working comfort. The writing table should be quite spacious, quite large and always in perfect order. There is such a concept as visual noise. I have often seen such a picture, when I worked away from schoolchildren, and when you go to their room they have a standard desk, over the desk shelf is hinged and all this is swamped – piles of different books, statuettes, toys, notebooks, pencils and everything else. And this is all very distracting, that is, the eye is constantly clinging to one object after another, so that this did not happen and you will not be distracted in the process of work it is necessary that your desktop was nothing but a laptop and all that you may still need to work, may be a notebook and a pen maximum as well, if the possibilities of your apartments allow, it is desirable to allocate under a working zone a place where there is a large amount of daylight, also do not forget to regularly ventilate the room the influx of fresh air not only beneficially affects your health, but also improves brain function, reduces fatigue and thus increases your efficiency.

Now let’s talk about organizing your time, after you’ve organized your workspace, cleaned up everything distracting, added everything you need, it’s time to talk about how to organize your time so that your whole life does not turn into work. It’s important to set aside your working hours and operate in the strict time corridor allocated for this purpose, as you work as a freelancer you have an advantage and you can determine for yourself which hours of the day you are most effective, it can be done over several days, calculating your level of productivity each hour, you can freelance time tracking where each hour you mark on a scale from one to ten. Determine how productive you feel, and then graph it. Also be sure to include in your schedule lunch break, time for a little walk and time for a little warm-up to stretch a little, not here all the time in one place and accelerate bloodflow.

Organization of the working day now there are many different techniques, programs for computer applications and they help not only to adhere to the established schedule, but also to systematize all your work tasks. They exist, of course, but there is no ideal system and the ideal application, so do not be lazy and test a few of these systems and see what suits you, because each of us has a different need to work and therefore suitable for each different technique, different applications of the most popular, Remember that our time is only our responsibility and you can not just leave things until tomorrow because for freelancer is very important self-discipline,

Self-discipline affects the final result of your work, so it is very important to stick to work schedule.

We are smoothly moving on to the third part. Of course, when working from home as the freelancer it has a lot of advantages, but it is important not to forget about the rest, because when you work on the freelance is often blurred not only the boundaries of the house work, but also the border work rest is very important, no matter what happens, because we want to work at home, do not live at work and do not forget that for productive work you need the energy of strength and this energy you should take from a good rest, when I first started working I did not have a weekend, I worked every day and it quickly led to a burnout. Now I took one weekend off this Sunday. This is a time when I only do my personal business – I rest, walk and do not think about work and regain my strength and prepare for a new working week. And you must also have a few full hours of rest every day. Exercise is not only a positive influence on your fitness for your health, but also on your work. I also have a few hobbies because it’s not productive to shut down all the time at work, and when you’re doing something else it will help you switch activities and switch to something.

And in general, after all, work on the freelance is a great opportunity to do more for themselves, so that the psyche could distinguish between work and non-working place and time. Come up with certain rituals for yourself it can be, for example, clothes, but when you work freelance there is a very big temptation to work in pajamas, with not done hair, but do not make this mistake.

So start working at home as if you are going to  the office, put on a suit, comb your hair, shave and only then start working. This will give your brain a signal that we are starting to work now. And when you’ve finished your work or finished the job, then leave your workplace, at least for a while, ideally go outside, walk, go to the store to make a concrete distinction, this is the end of the day and the beginning of the rest time, Of course for someone it would be better to rent an office space near the house, but someone can’t afford it, or they prefer to work in a home environment. The most important thing is to take care of yourself, so that fatigue and monotony do not lead to burnout, and your favorite work and home do not become hated.

I wish you good luck in our difficult business.

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