OnlineFreelance.com

The Hours

Depending from the type of your work we recommend an 8-10 hours working day for writers/translators and 6-8 hours for coders. But remember that you are a freelancer and there is no need to work all the 6 or 10 hours. If you can work effective for five hours, work five, but consider this fact when you are setting your rates. Learn to manage your time. You have 24/7 available and if you set a 40 hours working week feel free to distribute the hours between the days in the most suitable way leaving some time for things like home stuff.

Mood is a huge problem. Try to avoid annoying things like unpleasant letters or personal problems and focus on the work. Close the door, put the cell phone on silent and get into the current projects. For a beginner it will be very difficult to concentrate when working at home for the first few months, but eventually you will get over it. Working at night is a good solution. You will get less distracted, because everyone is sleeping, but you will definitely require some caffeine too keep you up during first nights. The fact that sleepless nights damage your health is questionable. Even if you finish your work at 4 A.M., you can always get your seven (recommended by the doctors) hours of sleep and get up at 11.00 A.M., which is still morning. Also working at nights is a good solution during summer, when it is really hard to thing during the heat.

The Breaks

A good break is sometimes even more important for an effective work than a good working time. The generally recommended length is from 15 to 30 minutes for 1-3 working hours. Try to avoid actions that require much time or are very interesting for you during breaks. Like watching new movies, reading interesting books and most important playing games. The movie or book could be too interesting and your 15-30 minutes will turn into an hour or so, and that is already a loss of time. Also avoid too much chatting during breaks. Games are one of the biggest enemies of a freelancer, but there is a way to solve this problem. A good solution is to fill the breaks with some short things like 20 minute sitcoms or games that have a time limit (in my case 10 minute long Resistance: Retribution online match). This will clear your head a bit and you can start working again. Getting a breath of fresh air or some exercise is also good.

Also you can make your breaks useful, read some work related forums and articles, bid on some new projects, check your mail, or make some basic document work. Usually if you are deep into some work problem the need to do such minor work is annoying, but if you’ve already done it during a break it will be helpful.

The Conclusion

Be flexible and learn to think different! OnlineFreelance only shares experience, it is up to you to spend some time experimenting with various schedules and finding the one that is most suitable for you.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 09:02 and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.