By Friday afternoon, if I’ve reached work goals I’ve set for myself on Monday, then I get to take the rest of the afternoon off. It sure has increased my productivity, quality of work, and serves to motivate me to NOT indulge in social media until work is done. Even for marketing purposes. (I don’t allow myself access to twitter or facebook because I inevitably get suckered in by all the work links sent out and read away my work hours.)

To know what my work goals are, on Monday mornings I spend the first hour of work plugging in projects into my work hours. planning my work and time, and then Fridays after lunch, I reviewing & evaluate my work, progress, projects, etc, and loosely plan my work for the following week. I’m much more at peace knocking off for the weekend knowing I have a plan in place to hit the ground running on Monday mornings.

p.s.: you should install a Subscribe to comments plugin

Have a nice day and thank you for the article (thanks for the commentators too!).

Simply great!

Cheers!

bangladesh freelance

Love the article though and very accurate.

Regards

i found it while reviewing and downloading your animated icons CSS snippet. thanks for that too!

i’ve been a self-employed freelancer, designing and programming websites since 1995, so here are some observations from my 14 years experience:

– your network of collaborators / friends / business acquaintances / etc will bring you the bulk of your work projects.

cold calls to unknown companies don’t work all that well.

so, nurture and grow your contacts network all the time, every chance you get: give a call to fellow designers you haven’t heard from in a while, go to social events, etc.

– if you can, have more than one basic skillset.

for instance, along with web design, i always was pretty good at fixing / debugging Macs, so i had a sideline as tech support along my main work as a web designer from the moment i started as a freelancer.

although it’s not always fun fixing buggy computers or fielding tech support calls from computer-challenged clients, it is well-paid, and it can provide secondary income when your main business hits a slow patch. furthermore, sometimes these tech support clients will feed you leads for web design jobs.

– as Adrian said, take the time to understand the basics of tax deductions.

for example: here in Canada (Québec province), if you are a freelancer (not an incorporated company), you can deduct a percentage of expenses related to a *rented* car (gas, monthly payments, repairs, insurance, etc), but you can’t claim those same deductions if you *own* your car: those same deductions can only be claimed if your company is incorporated, and if the company actually owns the car. consequently, i’ve been renting a car instead of buying one for years, and it saves me a lot of taxes every year.

– when times get tough, be creative with your business.

last fall when the recession hit hard, for the first time in years i saw a major dip in business. i started to ask myself:

where do my clients come from? answer: my contacts.
what do my contacts get from sending me clients? answer: nothing.

so, i decided to give out 10% of the project’s budget to my contact who referred me the job, as a commission. i called it my “recession special”, and started mentioning it to everyone in my network. pretty soon, the phone started ringing again, and i’ve been busy ever since.

– when things are going great, put some money aside for a rainy day.

resist the urge of spending all your money when you pile up several big-budget projects in a row. if you’re able to build up a nice cushion of several thousand dollars in your bank account, that will give you time and options if business gets slow for a while, some time down the road.

good luck to all!

although sometimes it can be difficult, and it’s probably not for everyone, nothing beats being your own boss. you are free.

sure, i’m debugging code at 2:00 AM… but monday afternoon, while everyone else is stressed-out and stuck in traffic, you’ll find me at the golf course, working on my golf swing.