Before becoming self-employed, I considered time management one of my greatest strengths. After all, I’d always gotten my homework done early in school, and I never missed a deadline in a professional setting. So, I reasoned, managing my time as a freelancer would be no trouble at all.
I was so, so naive.
It turns out that external pressure from bosses or teachers made a bigger impact than I realized. I can’t count the number of times I’ve started my workday after noon because I spent all morning messing around, or worked late into the evening because I squandered the day.
One thing stayed true, though: I never missed a deadline.
Through the years, I tried a lot of different time management strategies to keep myself productive. Eventually I found a few that reliably work for me.
In this blog, I summarize them so you can see if they might work for you, too.
Strategy 1: Break Up Big Tasks into Their Component Sub-Tasks
I believe one of the most important productivity skills anyone can master is the ability to break tasks down into smaller “sub-tasks.”
To illustrate why, imagine you’ve been tasked by your boss with creating a social media strategy. This sounds like just one tasks, but in reality, there are lots of sub-tasks embedded in that ask: competitor research, brand positioning, KPI development, production planning, content creation …
If you only think of it as one task, and that task is due in, say, two months, it sounds like you have plenty of time. You can do so many tasks over the span of two months, so doing one task in that time is nothing, right?
That’s how deadlines creep up on you.
If, however, you start by identifying all of that task’s component parts, or sub-tasks, it’s easier to internalize the fact that this project will take you a while, so you need to get started soon. Motivating yourself to work at a steady, even pace becomes easier.
Splitting tasks up makes it psychologically easier to get started, too. Creating a social media strategy is a big, complicated, overwhelming task, and overwhelm is discouraging. We naturally avoid overwhelming tasks.
But when you break it down into sub-tasks, you free yourself from the need to think about the whole convoluted package. Instead, you’re thinking about one task – one that’s probably much more straightforward and doable.
How I Use This Strategy
For most articles I write, I break them into a few sub-tasks: research and outlining, drafting, revision, and proofreading.
I typically prefer to do each sub-task on different days if I’m not in a time crunch (you catch more errors that way). So, whenever I’m assigned an article, I count four days backwards from its due date. That’s the day I’ll start the assignment.
Now, let’s say I have a project where I have to write three blogs, plus social and email copy for each blog. Emails and social copy are short enough that I don’t usually have to split them into sub-tasks. However, the overall project has plenty of sub-tasks. When you think about it, this project is actually nine separate deliverables – three blogs, three pieces of social copy, and three emails.
So, before the client’s due date, I give myself nine separate personal due dates. This keeps me working at a steady pace. (These personal deadlines can overlap and often do. For example, I might aim to complete a piece of social and email copy on the same day.)
Then, I count backwards from the final deadline, using my personal deadlines as milestones, to help me decide when to start the project and what to do each day.
My plan for this project might look like this:
Client deadline: Two weeks (10 business days) from today.
Personal deadlines: Blog 1 complete by end of week one; blog 2 complete by early week 2, blog 3 complete by middle of week two. Email and social copy completed over final two days of project.
Tentative project schedule:
- Monday week 1: Research topic and develop outlines for all three blogs
- Tuesday week 1: Draft blog 1
- Wednesday week 1: Revise blog 1
- Thursday week 1: Proofread blog 1; draft blog 2
- Friday week 1: Revise blog 2
- Monday week 2: Proofread blog 2; draft blog 3
- Tuesday week 2: Revise blog 3
- Wednesday week 2: Proofread blog 3; draft all email copy
- Thursday week 2: Revise email copy; draft all social copy
- Friday week 2: Revise and proofread social copy. Submit project.
Limit the Time You Spend Working
When you’re self-employed, you can technically work at any time. And you’ll have plenty of days where, technically, there aren’t any immediate tasks on your to-do list. And there’ll be a voice in your head saying that you don’t have to do your non-immediate tasks right away.
Don’t listen to that voice. Do those non-immediate tasks now.
Work is like a gas: it expands to fill the space it’s in. If I have two hours to write something, it gets written in two hours. If I have all day, it won’t get finished until the very end of the day.
I’ve learned from experience that if I want to stay energized and productive, I need to restrict the time I have for a project – even if I have to restrict it artificially.
One of the selling points of self-employment is that you can work whenever you want, but I quickly learned that I actually want to work 9-5. (Well, it ends up being 10-6 a lot of days, but don’t tell anyone.) I work for exactly eight hours (unless a major deadline demands otherwise) because when I limit the length of my work day, it forces me to focus. When I’m focused, I do better work.
On days when I don’t have any urgent client work, I proactively fill my schedule with other things. I list of all the marketing or admin tasks I could do, pick a few to focus on, and put a time limit on each them. To really motivate myself, I’ll stick a personal project I’m excited about (usually a creative writing project) at the very end of the day that I can only do if I’ve finished everything else.
When I give myself time limits and manage to stick to them, I feel accomplished and full of energy. When I don’t, I feel sluggish, both physically and mentally. Sticking to self-imposed time limits takes practice and will come easier to some people than others, but I highly recommend at least giving them a try.
Hide Your Phone
The internet, as glorious as it is, is the biggest time waster ever invented.
The inherent temptation of infinite depositories of information and entertainment is bad enough, but of course the real time-suck lies in social media feeds that have literally been designed to be as addicting as possible.
We all want to believe that we, in our superior wisdom and self-control, are capable of avoiding this addiction and closing our feeds whenever we want. We are all wrong.
These feeds are built around the same principles that keep gamblers pulling slot machine levers all night—that is to say, they are specifically designed to be impervious to willpower and better judgement. The key to beating them is to just avoid the fight.
During the work day, I keep my phone in a different room. Usually under a pillow, or in some other dumb out-of-the-way place, so when I go to pick it up, I have several extra seconds to ask myself, “Are you sure you want to open Instagram right now?”
I’m logged out of all social media on my work laptop except LinkedIn (and that one’s on thin ice). All social media passwords are incomprehensible strings of numbers and letters so, if I have a moment of weakness and decide to log in, I can’t. I don’t remember the password.
Sometimes, on really good days, I’m able to willpower my way out of the endless scroll. But on days when I’m tired or stressed? Forget about it. Better to just keep that endless scroll out of reach, like putting treats on a shelf too high for the dog to get at.
Now it’s time for a quick disclaimer: everyone’s brain works differently, and your mileage may vary.
I’m the type of person who thrives on schedules and structure. If you don’t, some of these suggestions might sound like nonsense to you.
Individualized time management is a process of trial and error. I encourage you to try out all these approaches, see what works, and throw out what doesn’t.
Next month, I plan to write a follow-up blog that gets a little more sentimental about what’s behind procrastination and other motivation issues. Until then, I free you to return to whatever task you were putting off by reading this.
Nicole D'Angelo 