Self-employment can be an incredibly fun and freeing style of pursuing a career. However, when you’re responsible for all productivity and accountability, it’s essential to stay organized for your own success.
The good news is that organization doesn’t have to come at a high cost. In fact, many low-cost solutions can help you stay on top of things and reduce stress. Below, we’ll explore seven budget-friendly ways for self-employed individuals to get their schedules in order and maintain control over their calendars.
1. Use Shared Digital Calendars
One of the most important facets of staying organized as a self-employed individual is keeping track of appointments, deadlines, and meetings. While paper planners work for some, digital calendars are far more versatile, especially when working with clients or collaborators. Tools like Microsoft Outlook allow you to manage your schedule simply.
Even better, learning how to share Outlook calendar with your clients, partners, or team members can help everyone stay on the same page. You can sync calendars to various devices, set reminders, and even color-code appointments, helping you to remain organized on the go. Best of all, it’s a free tool that is already included with many email services.
2. Leverage Free Project Management Tools
It’s one thing to keep a calendar to keep track of meetings and other events, but then there’s handling your day-to-day tasks at a more granular level. That’s where using a task management system can give you a high and low perspective of all of your work.
Thankfully, there are several tools out there that let freelancers and small businesses handle tasks for free. Tools like Asana, Trello, and ClickUp are great for handling small projects as a single worker. Each of these has free plans that provide ample features for prioritizing client projects.
3. Create a Dedicated Workspace at Home
If you’re an at-home, self-employed worker, you ought to devote a specific area of your home to working. It should, ideally, be cut off from other areas of the home and not used for anything else.
Your “office,” in this case, doesn’t need to be extravagant. It should be a clutter-free, simple workspace devoid of any distractions. Invest in inexpensive organizers like file trays, boxes, or shelves to keep papers and materials tidy.
4. Use Time-Blocking Techniques
As a self-employed worker, it’s easy for things to inundate your schedule. Time blocking prevents that from happening. Time-blocking is basically a set stretch of time in your schedule where you are focused on one thing and one thing only. Another way you could call this is simply “prioritized time.”
During your preset time blocks, you commit to completing the thing for which you set the time block. During that time, nothing else matters. If you can treat your time this way and give 100% of yourself to the task needing your attention, you will find that you can be incredibly efficient. The best part is that this doesn’t cost anything to do. Simply block off time in your digital calendar.
5. Prioritize Task Management With To-Do Lists
This one somewhat falls under the category of task management systems, but it distills it down a level further. Sometimes, the simplest way to attack a project is to simply list out all of the actions you need to complete and then do them. This will help you break up large tasks into more bite-sized tasks.
All of the task management systems mentioned above include features that allow you to create “sub-tasks” within a parent task. Using this, you can spell out all of the items needing to be done in order for you to accomplish a larger task.
6. Automate Repetitive Tasks
Manual entry is your biggest enemy when operating as a solopreneur. You want to find automated solutions at every corner as often as you can. This is definitely the case with any repetitive, recurring action you have to complete periodically.
Tools like IFTTT (If This Then That) and Zapier offer free options to automate various workflows. Whether it’s sending reminder emails, posting on social media, or organizing files in your cloud storage, automation tools can complete these things for you. Setting up these automations will reduce the likelihood of forgetting small but important tasks and free up your time for more critical work.
7. Track Your Time
Last, but definitely not least, is tracking your time. As a self-employed worker, you’ll spend a lot of time running your self-made business and completing billable hours of client work. It behooves you to keep a thorough time log of how you spend all of your time and for which applications.
Time tracking can help you identify areas where you’re spending too much or too little time, nodding to where you might want to make adjustments to improve your workflow. Thankfully, free time-tracking tools like Toggl or Clockify allow you to monitor your productivity and police your time effectively.
Ready to Win Back Time As a Self-Employed Professional?
There are a lot of details to juggle as a self-employed worker. The last thing you want is to consume more of your time with non-billable administrative tasks. Proper planning and time management is your golden ticket to winning back more time in your schedule. And that will only free up more time you can spend on revenue-driving activities.
So, how will you tidy up your self-employed operation?
