Working smart means getting things done in the most efficient way possible so that your time and effort spent are maximized and rewarded.
It means that instead of working harder, which can lead to overwhelm and burnout, you are making the most efficient use of your time, attention, and energy to get things done.
Here are 6 ways you can work smarter in your freelance business.
1. Take time out and exercise
If you’re feeling stuck or in a rut, it’s incredible what a burst of exercise can do to alleviate that feeling and provide you with more energy.
As well as the obvious health benefits of getting away from your desk or work setting, it can also provide you with the creativity boost you need.
By taking regular breaks, whether to do your favorite exercise or sport or to simply break state by walking around the block, you are working smarter because when you return, you’ll feel refreshed, energized, and more focused.
2. Stick to a routine
Having a routine that you stick to and being organized is far better than tackling things as and when they crop up.
Things can go pear-shaped quickly when you are constantly firefighting. Projects can go off the rails, and invoices are not sent or paid.
Of course, life happens, and there are times when you can’t stick to your normal routine. But if you have a backup plan, get back into the routine as soon as possible, and avoid multitasking, you’ll find you get a lot more done and will avoid starting something and not finishing it.
Naturally, adding some daily exercise to your routine (as per point 1) will be even better.
3. Adopt the Pareto principle
The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is where 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts.
So when it comes to business tasks, you focus on the 20% of your tasks that give you 80% of your results (or profits).
Likewise, identify and remove the 20% of activities that take up 80% of your time without contributing to your desired results.
For example, time-consuming admin tasks that eat into your day but don’t directly add to your profits, such as invoicing. Invoicing needs to be done if you want to get paid, but you don’t want to be spending an inordinate amount of time processing invoices manually when you could be servicing clients and doing other profit-making activities.
4. Plan ahead
Of course, no one knows what the future holds for sure, but throughout the year, you can be reasonably confident some things will happen, such as bills coming in, suppliers who need to be paid, invoices sent, and taxes to be paid. Your business may also be cyclical, so certain things need to be done at specific times of the year for you to make a profit.
The more you can prepare in advance for known future events, the better.
For example, keeping good records of income and outgoings as they occur throughout the year instead of having to scramble to get all the details to your accountant by a deadline at the end of the company year. These things come around quickly!
There are plenty of apps and online tools that can help you automate and record these things automatically, which nicely leads us to the next tip.
5. Automate business processes
You can save lots of additional time in your workflow by simply automating many of your business processes, especially those that are tedious, take up a lot of your time, or you are not an expert at.
These can range from simple automation, such as an online meeting scheduler, to good invoicing software so you can get paid fast and on time.
Fortunately, Invoice Ninja is a leading invoicing software for small business invoicing, online payments, tracking expenses and billable tasks.
What’s more, Invoice Ninja lets you connect to thousands of apps via our platform integrators, such as Zapier, Make, Pabbly and more – further speeding up your workflows.
Take a look at some of them here.
And try Invoice Ninja for free at the link here.
6. Repurpose content
If you are creating content to market your business, regardless of the medium (i.e. email newsletters, social media, video content, direct mail, etc.), you can repurpose it so that one piece of content goes a long way.
For example, you could write a long-form email newsletter. Snippets from the newsletter could be used as social media posts. You could then use part of it as a script for a YouTube video, which could be repurposed for other platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc.).
Repurposing content gets it out to a potentially much larger audience than it would if you were just to send out an email newsletter and never use that content again. It also takes up less time than constantly creating new content.
Obviously, the content would need to be tweaked to be suitable for the medium you are using, but it can still result in a much more effective use of your content (and time) and will free you up so you can focus on running your business.
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The key is to make your daily workflows as frictionless and streamlined as possible and outsource or automate tedious and time-consuming tasks.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that if a shortcut is taking up your time, then it’s not a shortcut.
