Hongkiat.com: Productivity Tips for Freelance Web Designers

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Productivity Tips for Freelance Web Designers Posted: 10 Sep 2010 09:33 AM PDT It has been known that working as a freelance web designers is very different compared to any ordinary daily jobs. Sure they are no super agents like CIA or SWAT, but freelancers are people who have 100% freedom in accomplishing their work. For example, working from bed, toilets, cafes, Disneyland and feel free to name any locations you want. Point is, being a freelancer can be more challenging because given its freedom, it comes with a price. Price we are talking about is distractions and other unique challenges that normal working people may not encounter and these challenges can put a freelancer to grave for it will definitely affect a freelancer’s deadline. What is worse is that, being on time before due or deadline is the only requirement imposed on freelancers. Therefore again, if it freelancers failed to deliver their work on time, fullstop is the outcome. Image credit. Else than the obstacles that a freelance web designers must deal with, the other issue is the ability to get as many job done within minimum time frame. This is the ultimate goal for any freelancers, hence the main course of this article. Today we are sharing tips and guidelines that will increase the productivity of a web designing freelancer. In order to become a successful and reliable freelancer, it consist of consistency and determination. There are no guarantee that these guidelines, tips or methods applies to every freelancer but we strongly believe, with sufficient discipline to at least try out, these guidelines will definitely benefit you. 1 – Have a routine for your daily task This happens to most of the working people where they set a goal in the beginning of the day and ended up accomplishing nothing close to their goal. Hence the important factor here is that one must have their own time table set up. These are the popular tools that will help keep up with your daily task. Image credit. Here are some tools that will help your routine work: Remember the Milk This is tools is very popular for web accessibility, which makes it a cross-platform solution that you can access from any computer. Remember the Milk lures users with its robust to-do list management options and its constant innovation. With tight integration with Gmail, Google Calendar and support for working offline with Google Gears. Todoist Todoist is an interesting calendar/todo application worth looking among the pool of crowded space of todo list webapps. Todoist is rich in keyboard shortcuts and can slice and dice your tasks by date – like what’s overdue, due today or due in the next 7 days. OmniFocus (For Mac) OmniFocus is designed to quickly capture your thoughts and allow you to store, manage, and process them into actionable to-do items. OmniFocus helps you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on top of all the things you need to do. 2 – Set Priority to your jobs There are times where there are few projects are running in the same time. Among those projects, there is definitely one that needs to be done ahead of others. Make sure to put those that needs to be accomplish ahead of others. This way can assist you to keep your working schedule on track. More: Make Your Passion A Priority At Work – Stepcase Lifehack – lifehack.org Effective Prioritizing for Freelancers – freelanceswitch.com 10 Tips To Help Freelancers Prioritize Tasks – designm.ag Increase Your Effectiveness: Identify And Focus on the Essential – freelanceswitch.com 3 – Know your strong points and strongest time of day Everyone has got different time where they feel most active and alert. Good news for freelancers as they get to chose whichever that suits them because they are their own boss. So, use this advantage to work on the time where you feel most alert. Me for example, when im not on my peak working condition, ill utilise those time to check my email, do some research or anything light to my brain. And when im on my working mode, i will put full concentration on my work. This is one of the way to not waste away time and maximize working performance. More: 5 Easy Ways to Start a Productive Day – freelancefolder.com 10 Ways to Work More Quickly and Accomplish More – freelancefolder.com 4 – Have fixed end time of your project In order to maximize productivity, you must prepare a schedule for your projects. With that schedule you will know how many projects you can handle in your slot and it is important to make sure the projecst are running accordingly to the schedule. The reason to make sure all these projects are following the schedule is to avoid projects fall out of the estimated progress and affect other projects as a result. Klok Klok is a personal time tracking Adobe’s AIR application which is free to download. Manic Time (Windows) ManicTime is a detailed time-tracking application for keeping tabs on where your workday goes SlimTimer (Windows) Slim Timer is built on the solid Ruby on Rails framework and has some tasteful usage of Ajax. Its a simple application to use, but one that is largely capable of time tracking for any size corporation or project. 5 – Know Your Distractions Try to identify what deems to keep you away from your job. After identifying these distraction, avoid them by all means when you are on your job. It may be hard but making it a routine will definitely help. More: 10 Ways to Eliminate Distractions – freelanceswitch.com 5 Ways to Manage Distractions for Increased Productivity – freelanceswitch.com How To Ditch Distractions And Stay Focused When Working Online – elance.com Fighting Distractions and Staying Productive – freelancefolder.com 6 – Get In To The Depth Of Style To increase the quality of your designing, always draft out the initiate idea and you’ll be able to develop the idea from there. You can start by making mockups. More: 4 Quick Tips To Help You Create A Better Mockup/Design In Photoshop – webdevtuts.net 10 Completely Free Wireframe and Mockup Applications – speckyboy.com 21 Prototyping, Mockup, and Wireframing Tools for iPhone App Development – iphoneized.com 7 – Check and Revise Your Work This is again a very important step whether you are in designing or any other field. You must revise if you have covered all modules and whether or not there is something unique that you have produce for your web designing. Lastly, after the above have been run through, you can run a test to make sure you did not miss anything before launching your project. Image credit. More: 10 Testing and Check Before Launching Your Web – smashingwebs.com 6 things to check before the site launch – brassblogs.com The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist – boxuk.com 8 – Get Enough Sleep, plan Your Next Day Work This can be achieved by setting a realistic goal. Web Designers ought to be up to date, sensitive to what is new and you cannot afford to slow down hence you must slot out some time for revision and researches . In order to meet such requirement, one must have sufficient rest and sleeping time. In the other hand, to make sure you have achieve enough in a day’s work, try to recap what has been accomplish and that allows you to identify what to do the next day. We do know that in today’s life most of us does not live healthy such as eating out and not having proper exercise. How does that even related to our discussion? Fact is eating right will put away petty sickness and petty sickness like flu affects you on your work more than you can imagine. Right amount of exercise also boost your stamina you need for your daily life. So try, eating on time, work out twice a week and see the changes you can make. Image credit. Do come to us with your methods boosting the productivity of web designing. Is this source of information helped you in managing web designing freelancing projects. Share your views and help us with your thoughts. (Bellefoong)

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