THE PENDING DRAFT

There are plenty of advices and techniques out there on how to be more productive and i’m sure you read most of what i write somewhere else before.

But anyway, i’d like to summarize what worked for me and what i changed over the last months to become way more productive than before.

1. Weekly Reviews

If you are a Freelancer and work on your own on most projects, it’s so damn easy to loose focus. Especially if working on side-projects with no direct monetary benefits or fixed deadlines it can be really hard to keep track. One really simple thing i started this year is writing a Weekly Review each Friday outlining which projects i worked on, the progress i made and what i plan for next week.

Even if you’re not going to keep your own word and have a To-Do in that “planned” list that you haven’t got done, i found that it puts a lot more pressure on me if i have to write it down again each week, rather than just moving an item in my Calendar.

2. Default your Calendar View to Weekly or Daily

Most of the time, i used iCal in Monthly View to plan ahead. This often led to unrealistically overbooked days because i just moved things around without really thinking about how long something will take. Of course, getting a birds-eye view from time to time is needed, but i default to the weekly view now and it helps a lot to plan things more realistic.

3. Publicly announce your side-project

As mentioned in the first paragraph, it’s hard to plan in enough time for side-projects, especially when a client with a paid job knocks on your door. Announcing your project publicly can help to put some pressure on yourself and to take a side-project more serious.

4. Blog daily (or do whatever, daily)

At the beginning of January, i basically just had the idea to relive this blog and felt that when i don’t post something daily i will soon loose traction again. So i kept to publish something daily for more than four months now. To be honest, i have no idea how that fits in with productivity and why it should be included in this list. It’s probably just that having any kind of daily routine, whatever it is, can help to train your overall discipline and that in the end will make you more productive.

There’s plenty more things i tried, but these are the most important one’s and even if they sound small and easy, they worked quite well for me.

What’s your secret productivity tipp?