Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated Topics4 Secrets of Working from Home from Veteran Freelancers

working from homeWorking from home can be awesome and awful at the same time. On one hand, you do spend more time with your family. On the other hand, you still have to work and you can end up writing all night long after spending all day with your dear and near.
Juggling a freelance job and family chores can be tremendously difficult, but it is possible. Do you want to know how veteran freelancers do it?

Working from Home: 4 Time-Proven Strategies

  1. Create a schedule. Meticulous planning is the key to working from home successfully. Cooking a soup – 12 minutes, explaining kids why vegetables are good for them – 8 minutes, making the schedule for tomorrow – 2 minutes. This detailed plan is not your path to snobbism, but simply a child of necessity!
  2. Be reasonably flexible. Flexibility is one of the top reasons for working from home. Do you want to do your shopping on Monday morning when most malls are empty and then start your working day in the afternoon? No problem. You can easily tailor your schedule to your needs or even whims. Just make sure your flexibility is reasonable and doesn’t push you to all night work sessions after watching all Gangnam style videos on Youtube.
  3. Avoid the traps of perfectionism. Do you know the saying “better done than perfect”? Let me make myself clear – I do not mean to sacrifice the grammar or punctuation of your papers. I just mean you need to know when to stop. The amount of time left before your deadline can be a perfect indicator of when you should stop racking your brains for something even better than what you already have and instead simply choose the best of your ideas.
  4. Fight distractions. Distractions are everywhere when you are working from home. No wonder your family can take your job easy – you work in your pajamas. Try to explain to them that you still have 8 hour (or even longer) working days and you need to concentrate on what you are doing.
    If, however, there are Internet temptations that do not give you a moment’s peace, you can try out any of the following FREE apps:

    • Facebook Nanny is an extension for Chrome browser which removes the distraction from Facebook but still allows you to communicate with the world. Every time you go on Facebook, you can spend 1 minute per each notification you have and only 15 seconds on the site if you do not have any notifications. You cannot change the time you spend on the site.
    • Rescue Time Lite can give you real-time statistics on the time you spend on different sites and apps. With this data, you will be able to draw appropriate conclusions as to where your time really goes.
    • Dark Room – restricts the functioning of your screen to writing only.

Would you share with other writers here your personal recipe on how to work successfully from home?
We’ll be happy to read your comments in the section below.

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