It sure feels great to have increased productivity as a blogger. The truth is that as a freelance blogger, you don’t really have a reason for being unproductive, especially as you have ample time to get your tasks done.
So, why do you find yourself falling off the rail?
Stop giving yourself more tasks in addition to your recent ones, knowing you may never get to achieving them. Don’t waste your time unnecessarily.
You don’t have to use your personal activities as an excuse. As a freelance blogger, I have other businesses I run efficiently outside the freelancing business. I have been able to evenly combine them together to ensure that I’m productive and also achieve my goal.
You may not have realized this, but your output in life and business is greatly influenced by your personality and approach to work.
But the underlying question here is, would you love to double your productivity? If yes, read on.
The most productive people in the world
If I ask you the people you consider to be the most productive, I’m pretty sure you will name just the popular and successful individuals you know and the people you term as productive, but this is necessarily not true.
The most productive people are the ones who work smarter and not harder. They take life easily and do their tasks as they come, not adding undue pressure or tasks on themselves and generating their revenue alongside. The people I would rather term as productive are those who know the value of work and set their priorities right.
As a freelancer, your schedule and productivity are your responsibility, and it is left for you to plan how they go. Your making income or getting cut off by a client is in your hands.
Yes, I know you are impatiently waiting to learn how you can double your productivity and this I shall give you.
Work less
The first thing you will need to do is to reduce your working hours. I know you must be like “What is she even saying?” but have you ever asked yourself why countries like The Netherlands and Cuba have more productive people? In fact, as of 2018, it was said that people in The Netherlands worked for just 4 days i.e. about 32hours, and these were people within the ages of 30-34years. You will also be surprised to hear that even with this short working hours, they are much more productive than countries where their people workup to 6days in a week.
The truth is that sometimes, the shorter the hours we are given to complete a task, the easier and somewhat faster we become productive within that limited time, unlike when we feel we have all the time in the world. I’m someone who used to procrastinate a lot, especially when I was still working for others. I would always tell myself that I had enough time to complete my task mainly because we closed at 5:30pm. At the end of the day I would not do the task and
would still blame it on not having enough time. The question now is, ‘how much time is enough?’ It’s never about the time spent working, but about the person performing the task.
Let’s bring this down to our job as bloggers. How many times have you had to spend hours rewriting a pitch or finding an ideal image for a blog post?
If you want to be able to focus on important tasks and also work smarter and not harder, here are some ways you can go about achieving that.
Increase your typing speed
As a freelancer, have you ever tried monitoring the time it takes you to recreate or type a post or document? If it’s anything above 2hours, you will need to increase your typing speed.
The number of post you create in a month as a freelancer is actually dependent on your typing speed. The number of hours you spend typing your blog post will overtime tell on your overall output at the end of every day. You can begin improving your typing speed by downloading and practicing typing using typing applications available online.
Increase your fee
A very big mistake most freelance bloggers make is undercharging their clients for their services rendered. You need to find and work your way up to start receiving better and higher writing gigs.
But just before you increase your rate, you must ensure that you have a laid down plan to increase your value as a blogger. You may need to update and streamline your portfolio page on your website ensuring your best content is shown to your prospective clients as well as your posts published on popular sites.
One thing I did when I wanted to increase my rate was to update my website focusing on attracting my ideal client and setting premium rates for them. Outside this, I also made sure to include testimonials from existing clients on my site. I did this to further boost my chances of increasing productivity, getting prospects to hire me, and achieving my goal. This is because for every product or service we purchase, there must have been some kind of recommendation from someone.
I suggest you also try doing this! The moment you are able to improve your value as a blogger, it will be very easy for you to increase your fees.
Create a digital system
You must understand that doubling your productivity doesn’t just happen overnight. You will have to streamline and automate certain tasks by adopting tools and a system, to help double your productivity and give you time. If you are looking for tools that can help you free up time, keep things under control and maintain focus, I suggest you checkout Google Drive and Trello.
You should be quite familiar with what Google drive is used for. If you aren’t, Google drive is a kind of storage space synchronized with the cloud where you can store up your files to be retrieved as desired. Not only does it store your files for future use, but it also lest you share your documents with others, as well as have them review and edit the documents if need be.
As a freelance blogger, you ought to learn to use Google drive as your clients may sometimes request that you submit your content via Google Docs so they can edit it and return to you for further revisions.
Away from this, Trello is an organizational tool that is digitalized and will help you keep your emails, blog posts, projects etc. in a place for future purposes. I totally love how I get to sync Trello with OneDrive, Google Drive or even Dropbox, thereby making it an organized system. I recommend using it to track bigger projects, sites etc.
Listen to music
From all you have learnt so far, you should already understand that it’s not all about working more, but on working smarter and better. You must learn to place your priorities right. Now, I’m not saying that listening to music should be a priority for you; rather I’m suggesting you listen to it to help calm your nerves and make you work better. But please, this has nothing to do with the normal hip hop and reggae music most people are prone to love. I’m talking about listening to normal country music and possibly RnBs, anything to help keep you focused on a task and double your productivity.
I love listening to music while I work. In fact, I am actually listening to Kenny G’s ‘You’re beautiful’ as I’m writing this. This song soothes my mind and nerves and serves as a source of inspiration. It also makes me concentrate better and eliminate all forms of distractions.
If you aren’t the music loving type but want to concentrate using sounds, I suggest you download an application like Coffitivity or Soundrown to do this.
There are days when it will feel like you aren’t getting anything right, from your blogging work to possibly personal matters. This is the best time for you to listen to music and draw inspiration from it.
FAQS
1. How can I be a productive blogger?
First of all, you should create your blog posts days or even weeks in advance. This will help you be a more productive blogger. Next, you should schedule your blog posts. Remember to take breaks while you’re creating a blog post.
2. How can a blogger remain motivated?
Have a blogging ritual that you follow anytime you want to blog. This means you should have a special routine that you stick to. It could be listening to music or drinking a cup of coffee.
3. What are some productive habits?
Some productive habits include getting rid of distractions, focusing on one task at a time as well as beginning your day early.
Wrapping it up
Increasing your productivity should be one of your major concerns as a freelance blogger. I advise you study your daily activities and effectively plan it for optimum utilization.
You will need to cultivate the habit of ensuring you work smarter and not harder. This means working for a limited number of hours, but ensuring you achieve your task. A lot of people focus on important tasks that aren’t urgent rather than urgent tasks that are important. You can also begin listening to music while working to help avoid unnecessary distractions.
In conclusion, ensure that whatever lane you decide to walk down will be the one capable of helping you achieve your dream of doubling productivity.