People hear about how working freelance is a rewarding experience. It is.

But keeping yourself organized is the name of the game to gaining that rewarding feeling, as well as your invoices steady flowing.

There are a few straightforward tips to manage the workflow so that you can serve clients in a timely manner, avoid burnout, and time your payments in a reasonable manner.

• Create a mental and physical space for deliberate practice. Intense focused practice of a skill, subject knowledge, or abilities is what helps you not only overcome “imposter syndrome” but also offer a moment where you can tie pieces together. To make the most of deliberate practice you should concentrate on a skill for a shorter tighter time block. You can then journal the effort to see your progress over time.
• Developers have learned to do this, but the same approach can apply for any technical skill. Efficiency will come with repeated deliberate practice.
• Ignore the News A Little. Today’s news is full of human interest topics that may seem harmless but become a distraction when you are learning a new topic. Even if many stores are interesting to you depending on your personal preferences, you could easily overindulge on posts and videos.
• This takes time away from the deliberate practice that you would need to accomplish major projects or to do meaningful collaborative work with teams. You can also spend too much time parsing what ideas fit your needs for the days ahead. The right thing to do is to have a personal budget for how you spend time with media.
• Assess what alerts and notification are really needed from your software, websites, and news sources. Receiving too many alerts in a day is a distraction for deep thinking activities such as programming, writing, and completing complex tasks.
• Build the idea, don’t overthink or over-explain its benefits to yourself before making headway on the project. “Move fast & break things” is a developer mindset that has existed for some time now. With software and data infused into how businesses operates, you need to move relative quickly to make your idea into a viable product, even if your “business” is just you as a freelancer.
• Develop a workspace to refine your idea, and stick to it in a professional manner — making the tasks a priority of your time over, say, the news. 🙂
• Be ready to adjust the advice you receive form people as you seek criticism for your idea or business. Too many times advice is given from the viewpoint of being so general that it won’t give you any specific inspiration to take action . You need specific feedback and tactics that helps you make a decision. So ask the giver how the advice fit your situation.
• Never accept the initial answer as being absolutely right forever and ever. It’s too easy to take the initial result and think that it’s good enough is an ongoing right answer. But good enough is usually not good enough because there are alternative being developed in different facets of life. Thus, one needs to invest the time and effort to explore details to see if a better “good enough” answer exist.
• Developer who work with programming tend to this al the time, but it is possible for those with a more limited skill to see how to best
• Be skeptical on how online sources are treated as a fact. Never accept someone’s “statement of fact” from a post as an absolute “fact.” A webpage can present a factual statement, but can alter what content you read or hear presenting around the factual statement to imply something else as absolutely true when it is not.
• With so ,much content available today it is very easy to accept at face value whatever someone tells you from a post, but it is possible that the purpose in sharing a topic is not framed entirely well, especially for hot button topics such as politics. Discerning facts from opinions online requires following a narrative and reading the arguments for and against a topic to understand the issue.
• Keep meetings at 30 minutes. Ask for a preview of what someone wants to talk about with you or provide a preview, if you are the requester, of what people want to discuss. Keep any rambling down to a minimum.
• Say “No in a Reasonable Manner” when presented with a request for a task. Doing so reflects how you pick your battles. Sometimes, responding harshly with people at first impulse, especially through a digital media such as social media posts or email.
• Take an occasional day dedicated to decluttering files and associated documents. Information on a given topic becomes stale and outdated and you will discover material that can be reused for a project or blog — or material that is outdated and need to be retired.
• When you declutter assess what feedback you are receiving. Feedback reduces the gap of time that occurs between cause and effect. That reduce saves time, and helps to infuse productivity in what is being provided. The reduction also helps to planning learning blocks of time better. The end result is feeling more accomplished and more ready to serve customers well.

Originally published on medium.