My freelance work eats up a lot of my time that I already need a household help to do the daily household chores. Just doing blogging tasks alone keeps me working at the start of the day until late in the evening. I’m trying to work within the US time zones since I get more work opportunities that way, so I get to stay up late until after midnight and wake up near noon.

photo credit: justino307 (SXC)

Opportunities come up often each day and I almost do not run out of things to do. I would rather opt to pay someone to do a portion of my daily duties. This includes some tasks that allow me to get some substantial traffic for this blog. I’ve already outsourced one task as a part-time job for another person to do. I intend to hire more people to get me relieved from such tasks and let me concentrate on pressing tasks, such as coming up with freelance article pieces for this blog and doing bits of SEO at the same time.

Every worker has to learn how to manage a set of tasks that are to be done during the day. As I am relying purely on my active work to earn income, I had to prune out parts of my freelance job. Make a list of tasks that are to be done during the day and before numbering these tasks according to priority, eliminate the time wasters first. The points are mentioned below:

• Do the task at a later date. If the job can be postponed then do it so. Find a free day or free time to do the task.
• Have another person do the task. I already got other people do some chores to relieve me the stress of too much work to do.
• Find another way to simplify the task. I found a number of duties that I can simplify. Sometimes using software can help me simplify such task. Learning another method can be difficult in the beginning, but if done effectively then it could be a great time-saver.
• Determine tasks that can be done by batch. This is much related in simplifying tasks. In my case, I do blog visiting and commenting at the end of the week, instead of doing it when I do not have things to do. I do blog redesigns at the end of the week too.
• Make the most out of idle time. Here, keeping a list can be handy. Sometimes I find myself faced with too many tasks to do and I do not know which one is next to my list. The list can be helpful when there are some idle periods.
• Determine resources that are useful to the job but takes up too much time. I’ve upgraded my PC to a faster one so that I can run the latest software, which demands more out of hardware. I’ve upgraded my internet connection so that I can also work fast. A slow PC is counterproductive so I am looking towards upgrading it.
• Just drop the task from the list. There are simply some jobs that are truly time wasters. For me I changed my IM status from busy to invisible, since I realized that simply talking to someone really wastes a lot of my time. I turn on my visibility to the person whom I need to talk immediately.

Proper planning of activities will surely lead to better ways of maximizing time to the fullest and having loose extra time change at the end of the day for replenishing work energy.