Freelancer time management: main challenges
Variety of tasks
The range of duties of an ordinary office employee is extremely limited. On the one hand, it may seem boring, on the other hand, it's about consistency. Optimizing a freelancer's workflow is an attempt to reorganize and streamline the Brownian motion. It's worth scheduling and dedicating a day to work on a single project, and two new potentially good clients come in. They need to discuss projects today. As a result, there is a switch, although it is difficult to work intermittently, and the result suffers from it.
A freelancer is a boss, accountant, sales manager, and administrator in one person. In organizations, separate people are hired for all this, but the freelancer performs all these functions independently.
Resource constraints
Imagine that a person's life expectancy suddenly increased to 500 years. Would you be so strict about not having achieved great professional heights by the age of 40? Probably not. Our desire to use our time as productively as possible is explained by the fact that we have very little time. If we use it incorrectly, we may end up living this life in a different way than we would like.
A freelancer is a person who always feels a critical lack of time, and often - energy. All this is due to the previous point - too many multifaceted tasks that can only be delegated to yourself.
Emotional burnout
Where does it come from? From the same first point. One person performs the duties of several people, and a stress factor can “fly in” from each sphere. A client in the main line of work will send a seventh round of unreasonable edits, an error may creep into the accounting department that needs to be urgently corrected. In messenger - a rude message from a random person who found your contact and demands to give him a job. And it seems like it's time to just go on vacation, but when an organization has a dozen people going on vacation at the same time, it stops. A freelancer is his own organization in one person.
How will optimizing a freelancer's workflow with Voiset help?
Less distraction by unimportant and non-urgent tasks
Voiset allows you to prioritize each of your tasks. What does it do? You can use your resources rationally. For example, if a new potential client writes to you, you can schedule a conversation with him/her in a couple of hours instead of at the same moment. This is reasonable if you are doing a high-priority task right now. Voiset also gives you the ability to “set” the right focus and maintain focus with the built-in timer for the Pomodoro method.
Less time consumption with higher productivity
When you have an idea or remember an important task, dictate a note to Voiset. It only takes a few seconds, but Voiset will remind you of the note and even offer to create a task from it and put it on your schedule.
Harmonizing your schedule
Most freelancers work in spurts, loading one day to the max and completely idling the other days. This kind of work format leads to burnout (link to article) when doing even the work you once burned out on becomes unbearable torture. AI in Voiset will organize the tasks in your schedule so that you don't work at your limit and don't get so tired that you need a few days off afterward. It is precisely the evenness of workload that is the right approach to work in the long term.
The best task scheduling tools for freelancers: Top 3
Smart notes
Imagine you are busy working on a project, but suddenly you receive a message from a regular client asking for a call. What do you usually do in such situations? Most likely, you switch to talking to the client. This reduces your productivity, not improves it: achieving optimal concentration, full immersion in the work on the task is possible only in the absence of distractions. But if it happens and you see a trigger message, you will keep the new task in your head, repeating: “don't forget to call Mike back.” So how do you deal with this situation?
Use Smart Notes in Voiset. Dictate a note to the app and it will save it. At this point, you can relax and continue working on your project. When you finish it, you'll see that Voiset prompts you to make the note into a task and put it on your schedule. It's very convenient! Most importantly, once you try this approach a few times, you will see that reacting instantly to every message not only does not increase your productivity but decreases it many times over.
Automatic scheduling feature
Do you remember the game SIMS? In it, you can control your character and maximize his or her productivity. You can organize your life in the same way: in a planned and orderly manner. To do this, you can use Voiset's intelligent planning function.
Let's say you have three projects to complete next week. Trust Voiset to create your schedule and AI will find the best day (or several) in your schedule to complete all tasks. The choice of days won't be random: the AI will analyze both your workload and the importance of each to-do. This is convenient even when there are dozens of things to do, and it's scary to even imagine how exactly to do them all! Do them without rushing, systematically, and following the scheme suggested by the AI.
Smart calendar
Let's say you have received several revisions on your work, and the client asks when you will make them. This situation is stressful for almost any freelancer, which is why unrealistic deadlines are often set. Now imagine that even in the most stressful of situations, you can open your calendar, where the color-coded display gives you an instant understanding of each day's workload. And now you already see that you have Wednesday practically free, and put making adjustments on it. Result: the client is happy to receive the corrected work just in time.
The smart calendar in Voiset is an organized chart of your life made by AI. You will see the workload for each of your work areas. Tasks are organized in a logical view by due date, without overlapping. The calendar has daily, weekly, and monthly views. If you want to move a task from one day to another, you can press the mouse button and drag it. It's very convenient, don't you agree?
Voiset has many other features that will make a freelancer's life easier. It's also a variant of a freelancer time tracking app: you'll be able to get statistics from AI on the productivity of your life and work. Be able to link clients to work areas. And you'll also be able to organize your work life and personal life, because balance between the two is very important.
Voiset will help you make each of your days more productive, but not through additional acceleration, but through consistency in your actions. If you want to check out this revolutionary approach to task management for freelancers, try Voiset!
