In October, I announced I was going to be redesigning a new work area. A quick recap: I have office furniture in storage, but my current living situation doesn’t have the room to set it up. I had three requirements:
One of the best parts of freelancing is you can work anywhere. One of the worst parts of freelancing is you can work from anywhere. What do I mean? In theory, I only need my iPad or MacBook and my mobile hotspot and I’m in business. This is a good thing. In practice, however, a few other things get added to the list. Headphones. Chargers. A mouse. You get the idea. It is AWESOME to work anywhere, but it is definitely an adjustment of sorts to have dedicated space to work but to also be ready to take your work with you. Most days, I work from home. But I also work from a co-working space. And there are days I travel and bring work with me.
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We’re getting down to the wire, and 2016 is about to be over. My New Year, New You series is drawing to a close…now that you’ve managed your to do list and your calendar and gone paperless, you need to set up some goals. A quick note on resolutions vs. goals. To me, the word “goals” conjures up a sense of importance, whereas “resolutions” feels more like “I’m gonna try hard but who knows!” That’s just me. Whatever YOU call them, goals or resolutions, you need a plan to make them happen. Today, I want to write about how to set your goals. This is NOT a post with advice on what goals to set (although I’ll share some ideas to get your wheels turning). This is a post that approaches goal setting as a task, and the best ways to keep track of your goals and accomplishing them. I’m not a psychologist or therapist (I am, however, an expert at telling people what to do). You’ll need to decide what’s important to you.
In a perfect world, everything would be paperless. In one of my first blog posts, I wrote about why going paperless is so awesome. I could sing the benefits of going paperless a thousand different ways, and since doing so, I’ve made the argument to anyone willing to listen (and many who weren’t). RELATED: Preparing to Be Paper Free: First Steps The reality, though, is that paper is still going around. And while I set up a system to go paperless and stay that way, and my incoming paper has dramatically decreased, it hasn’t disappeared. There are some things that you just have to hold on to.
When I wrote my post on how I manage my calendar, I told you I always take Sundays off, and that I would be posting about this in more detail this month because I think it’s that important. So, here we are. RELATED: Three Steps to Design Your Schedule The benefits for a day of rest are widely-known, even if the actual resting parts are not widely-practiced. Even God rested on the seventh day. From that, I don’t feel I need to pitch the benefits of resting one day a week. By resting, I don’t mean being lazy. It means abstaining from work and chores and all that jazz. It means focusing on things I enjoy.
Now that it’s December and we already covered task management, we need to decide how to manage our time. Because guess what? If you have the most organized digital storage system and the most awesome task management system and your calendar is a hot mess, well, then nothing else matters.
Over the years, I’ve tried various approaches to calendar management. I’ve used theme days, time blocking, all kinds. Some of these worked, some of them didn’t. For this post, I hit the Internet to find the best tips and advice for calendar management. There’s no shortage of articles out there with suggestions on managing your calendar, but I wanted to know that my system was going to work for me. I’ve covered my digital filing system and task management system before; both draw from various methods and workflows, and both just work. Why? First, they’re easy and don’t require much thought. As such, neither system impacts my work or takes time to keep up with. Second, every item or task, regardless of what it is or what area of my life it falls under, goes through the same flowchart-of-sorts. |