Of the many perks of being a freelancer, there are a handful of adverse side affects. Being a robot employee from 9 to 5 does not entail being motivated to innovate and revitalise your work ethic and business acumen. From time to time freelancers can have dampened spirits and visualise bleak forecasts for their business. It is mandatory, however, to remain inspired and below I will discuss one of the many methods of staying focussed and motivated as a freelancer. There are three steps in this method.
Subscribe to our RSS for more awesomeness
1. Visualise
Take some time off to do this first step. You will need around an hour so sit somewhere comfortable and where you can think easily.
Write down on a piece of paper “1 year” and “10 years”. Now you need to visualise what you wish to achieve in the coming year. Where would you like to be standing in terms of your finances, reputation, projects being scored etc. Imagine yourself standing a year from now, what have you achieved in the past year to make it so good? Write down all the thoughts which come to your mind. You may want to include non-freelancing goals which is obviously fine, however I will speak about your business goals.
CLICK ME SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS
Write down your ultimate goal – this is the final main result which you wish to achieve at the end of the year. After you have written down your main goal, write the objectives – this is how you will get to the ultimate goal. Let’s use an example.
Jake is a new freelancer who initially wants to keep up on mortgage payments and eventually be working less so that he can spend more time with his wife. What is Jake’s ultimate goal? It is not “more money” as you may think, but rather to spend more time with his wife.
Now at the top of the page write your ultimate goal (for the year), for Jake this would “spend more time with wife”. I would also add a picture or some art that will help you visualise your ultimate goal. From this goal draw lines downwards and write your objectives. For Jake this would be “make £X a month” and “work Y hours”. You could add some visual references here too.
Do the same for ten years and move on to the second step.
2. Doing it
Now you have an awesome layout of what you wish to achieve in the next year and ten years you can start heading towards your ultimate goal. The way to head toward your goal is to constantly have a vision of the future in front of you. Every day before you sit down to work, you should look at this paper which shows your goals. 5-10 minutes of thinking about what you need to achieve is enough to really get you motivated.
Whilst visualising think of how the work you will do today will push you toward your goal and think about how it will feel to achieve your goal. Some people will have auditory reminders for example they will make an audio recording of what their aims are and listen to these in the morning. Choose a method which you feel will be most effective for yourself.
3. Bitesize
There is no way that you will be able to achieve these goals in a day or even a month. This is why you need bitesize daily goals heading toward that ultimate goal. Write yourself a to-do list and list everything you need to do which will help you step toward your ultimate goal.
Mention everything that needs to be done during the day and place your to-do list somewhere where you can see it easily throughout the day. Stick to the to-do list and don’t do anything unless it is on there.
You may want to check how important the things on your to-do list are. If your to-do list has things like “watch a film” or “go on facebook” take them out. Anything which does not push towards your ultimate goal should not be on there.
Final Word
By staying focussed on what matters most you will remain motivated and inspired. Whichever system you use, make sure it helps you see your ultimate goal at all times. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS!
Places To Find Work For All Types of Freelancers
Elance – They have over 30,000 jobs posted. They also cover many different categories, almost any type of freelancer can find work here.
oDesk – With almost any set of skills you have, you should be able to find freelance work here. They have a wide variety of categories. This is a heavily posted website.
Subscribe to our RSS feed
Follow us on Twitter
