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Every freelance writer has to contend with one major obstacle… Lack of TIME!!

As a freelancer, you never have enough of time yet you are only paid for the time you dedicate to your projects (and of course the amount of work done).

For that reason, freelancers need to leverage their time so that they can make the most out of it and earn more online money (or should I say more money online? Just kidding )

Let’s take a closer look at strategies you can use to effectively manage your time and get more work done in less time.

Time Management for Maximum Freelancing Profits

Let me ask you a simple question. Do you ever get the feeling that you are chasing an elusive dream? Have you ever spent a whole day on the internet and at the close of the day you just couldn’t account for those 8, 9 or 10 hours?

photo credit: Riebart

Well, it sure happens to most freelance writers. I know it is no fun, I’ve been there. And despite my extensive experience online, I once in a while end up in that situation where I have absolutely no clue what the heck I am doing. It’s like a kind of temporary brain freeze.

Here’s the thing. If you find yourself spinning your wheels in place, odd are that you are trying to do too much at once. You need to focus and develop a solid action plan that is well laid out so that you can easily follow through with your weekly schedules while monitoring your progress.

Sure time flies and like they say “Time and tide waits for no man”. But “time sure flies” is no longer going to be your excuse for the time and energy you waste in 2012 if you are to make more money online writing.

On the same note, one of the most common mistakes that new freelance writers make is to do a little of “this” and a little of “that” and before they know it, those tiny tidbits adds up to a full day schedule. Consequently they end up extremely busy trying to wind up a dozen different projects that they personally self-sabotaged along the way.

I understand that changing your focus and behavior is easier said than done for the majority of people but once you have done it, everything will change.

The question however is, how do you develop that rock solid action plan that will help keep you laser focused as a freelance writer? It is actually not such a complex system and extends to more than just time management.

You see, time management is not the most important element involved in getting yourself on the path to success. Life management is a better and more accurate reflection of the things you need to pay attention to in order to increase your productivity and efficiency.

On that note start by thinking over how your daily routine affects your productivity as a freelance writer. What is the first thing you do in the morning when you log in to your computer? How much time do you spend reading emails, chatting on facebook, on Twitter, on Skype, on online forums, etc?

If you take the first three hours of your day hanging on social networks that is the first habit you will need to readjust.

I personally had the most horrible work habits of anyone in my industry. When I got online the first thing I would normally do was to check my email, log into facebook, then twitter, hang on various online forums and respond to private messages, moderate my blog comments, recheck my email, and rinse and repeat the entire process.

And before I realized it would be 1 pm, with nothing much done in as far as my writing and blogging schedule was concerned. These things were really not helping my business grow.

On other days, I would waste my entire mornings doing “nothing important” and then work until late hours of the night when I was already exhausted and less productive. I would crawl into bed as the sun was coming up and sleep until noon.

photo credit: joiseyshowaa

And that draining cycle of life would keep on repeating itself. I had to fit everything into my day in just a few hours. This more often than not only pushed my energy down.

That is the point where you start feeling as though you are chasing a wild dream that is hard to come by.

But making a complete transformation from these old habits was not very easy. After all I had spent a better part of my online life barreling down the same old path. We are creatures of habit; that is without doubt. And whether they are constructive or downright destructive, breaking from habits hardwired in our brains is pretty difficult.

All the same, I started being honest with myself. If I really wanted to succeed making money on the internet writing, I had to emulate the work habits of the most successful people I knew. (And to be sincere, none of them were doing what I had been doing. It was sadly true).

So, what major change did I make to my life? My sleep and work habits.

If you will agree with me, there are certain times of the day when you are able to get more work done in less time. This is the time of day when you are at your peak performance. When I finally evaluated my habits and overall performance, I realized that my morning hours were my “prime hours”.

If I had to do a demanding task like writing an essay or eBook on a somewhat technical subject, that was the best time to start doing it since it is when I am typically at the top of my game (ama ni swag? ).

After the morning session, I most of the times start to slow down and by late afternoon, I often find myself struggling to keep focused. Drinking gallons of coffee may sound like a great remedy but it doesn’t really help that much, in my opinion.

Let me be upfront here with you though. If you have a similar lifestyle, you are not alone. Most online entrepreneurs and writers struggle with the same problem. We are left with the freedom to set our own schedules and decide our fate. But for most people, that is a dangerous power to have.

I knew that in order to be as productive and prosperous as I could be, I had to dig deep and come to terms with the fact that I was my worst enemy. I had to start justifying the time I spent online and start holding myself responsible and accountable with how I spent my work time.

Once I did that, everything started to change, I was on earlier and off at the earliest possible. My performance improved tremendously and I was churning out new literary pieces (articles, eBooks, reports, essays, website content etc) faster and easier that ever before.

I was able to cater to the specific needs of my clients in a very different way, having all the time, motivation and energy required to give my best shot. With that I was able to facilitate better satisfaction for my clients while being able to breeze through my daily work schedule more efficiently. That last sentence should make you tick if you intend to make more money online writing.

Changing my sleep and work habits was the single most important decision I have ever made in as afar as my online business and work habits are concerned.

As a freelance writing professional, it is very important to get into the proper mindset. It might be true that you are working for yourself (technically), but you still have deadlines to meet. You have to be far more responsible than if you were launching your own projects since missed deadlines and lagging projects will eventually cost your clients money. Worse still, it could lead to loss of clients and poor feedbacks on the freelance job boards.

Simple Steps That Will Help You Enjoy Your Life as a Freelancer

photo credit: flyzor

Now let’s look at some helpful tips that will help you do more and make more money as a freelance writer while having all the time you need to enjoy your life the way you deserve to.

Quantity control

You read right, that is NOT “Quality control” even though that is as well very important. But on this instance we are talking about “quantity control”.

As an online freelance writing professional, it can be extremely tempting to accept all the freelance writing gigs you can. After all, it makes sense since you earn based on the number of projects you are able to complete.

But as true as that holds, you need to limit the number of projects you accept irrespective of how much luring the prospect of that extra income is.

I know it sounds counterproductive but getting your projects delivered quickly while at the same time maintaining quality for your work will lead to a better profile in the long-term and more income prospects as happy clients are always likely to become repeat customers. That is how you get invitation to bid on high paying writing projects you were not even aware of.

It is absolutely important to manage the number of projects you accept so that you don’t end up getting overwhelmed. I have seen writers ruin their reputations simply because they bit off far more than they could chew resulting in delayed projects and unhappy clients who go out complaining on public forums online.

Such clients may be difficult to please even after you have finally submitted their projects since they might have hard-wired the notion of unreliability in their minds, leading to a negative tendency towards your work output.

Focus On Just One Project at a Time

You should as much as possible always try to work on one project. I don’t mean that you limit yourself to accepting only one project at a time, but rather to queue your projects systematically and work on one of them at a time.

This increases your efficiency tremendously especially if you are writing on a topic that you are not so much familiar with. Working on all the projects at the same time often makes you confused and necessitates refreshing your memory every time you revert to a project you had been working on earlier on.

The quality of your work may as well suffer.

Always let clients know that their completed project will be delivered by a specific date and make sure to leave adequate time. Don’t get overzealous as to promise to deliver the projects to your clients within unrealistic time range that you know only too well you can’t keep up to or lie just for the sake of winning a project.

Instead decide on a realistic delivery date and try to submit the project a day or so ahead. This is a very smart strategy for generating great feedbacks and reviews, getting happy client and generating repeat business.

Create a Regular Working Schedule

photo credit: alexkerhead

It is also advisable to try and maintain a regular working schedule that is set around your optimum performance hours of the day. Of course it is not so easy to stick to a strict working schedule and it won’t always be possible. You may for example have to work late at night sometime to finish up a demanding project.

That is just how the life of a freelancer writer is.

Just do your best to identify the times of day when you are at the best of your game and try to squeeze in some work during that part of your day.

Make Copy-Paste feature Your Friend

Now this may sound a bit controversial for writers, but I am not condoning plagiarism or any illegal use of copyrighted content. Don’t get me wrong. What I am instead referring to is the use of copy paste functionality of your computer to gather draft materials into your working space (e.g. Microsoft word).

As a beginning writer, I would make the mistake of trying to read, integrate and then write articles and other content from my head. This was out rightly inefficient and it took me more time to put the words to paper than was really necessary.

So what is the best way to research and write your articles? Well I recommend gathering relevant content into your word processor at a mark slight higher than the number of words required, and then rewrite the content in your own words while not having to toggle between tabs on your browser.

For instance, if you are writing a 3000 words essay, you should first of all gather relevant materials from across the web (up to about 4000words or more) while noting down the source URL, then rearrange and rewrite your fine draft.

And of course you must proofread your final draft scanning for errors and to ensure smooth grammatical fluency.

Take a Break

photo credit: seanmcgrath

As obvious as this may be, most freelance writers may at times get hang on completing a project so much so that they forget to take a break off their writing schedule.

To quote the old man in the “Legend of the Seeker”, “Sometimes you have to slow down to gain ground”.

That is true for online writing as it is for all other professions and routines because when fatigued, your brain performs at below par levels. Thus taking a time off is a great way to revitalize yourself and boost your overall performance.

In conclusion online writing is a splendid approach to making a full time living on the internet especially if you have a passion for playing with words and have the flexibility to work with diversified topics. You may find yourself writing about “binary options” one day and “beanie hats” the other.

The other great thing about freelance writing is that it provides a fair playground for all the writers and a writer in Kenya can compete head to head with a writer in the US or the UK. The best weapon is to focus on building a great portfolio and profile on the writing jobs board you use. Period.

It’s my sincere hope that the above tips will help you make more money writing online in 2012.

Related posts:

1. How to Make Money Online In Kenya Writing