Three Tools for Productivity in Freelance Work

Three Tools for Productivity in Freelance Work The world is filled with productivity killers. Especially if you’re a freelancer. Especially if your primary source of income is online. This humble writer, for example, has been plagued by them all morning. An empty pet food dish is, after all, an emergency, and Facebook notifications must be compulsively checked and cleared. Productivity in freelance isn’t just about removing distractions, however. Creating a workflow that leads you through the day, minimizes multitasking, and helps you set priorities is one of the best ways to reclaim your time. You can do this by adding new tools and apps to your repertoire, creating automated or streamlined ways of performing routine tasks, and even changing the way you think about your projects. Streamlining Your Time for the Best Productivity Focus on completing one task at a time. A clear set of task priorities can be an elusive thing, but it’s important to keep a clear head and a sense of priority so that you can work efficiently through stressful days. The choices can be agonizing when something urgent comes up in the middle of a time-intensive task. An email from a panicked client, a problem with a project on a tight deadline, or a simple overabundance of things to do can wreck an entire day. But if you take it one task at a time, in order of priority, you’ll spend less time worrying and more time knocking work off the list. Don’t be tempted to multitask. Research shows that focusing on task priority, cutting the fat in terms of busywork, and avoiding multitasking all make you a more efficient worker. Multitasking splits your attention and it’s easy to lose sight of your priorities. Multitasking can quickly lead to “mission creep” â€" where one unexpected task leads to another, over and over again, until you’ve spent an entire day on work you weren’t planning on doing. Apps and Tools to Keep You On Task Quickbooks has a great resource that collects tools from across the web and various app stores. It’s comprehensive, and a long read, but well worth the time if you’re looking for some automated little boosts to your time management. Some of the most useful tools are quite passive, and include time trackers that let you know how long you spend on particular sites (coughfacebookcough) or blocking them completely during set hours. Others set focus timers for you, remind you to take breaks, or even alter the colours on your computer screen for less eye strain. Simple additions like this, even the occasional reminder to get up and stretch, can have a major impact on your day. This isn’t just about squeezing every ounce of productivity out of your day, it’s also about managing your health and happiness. Changing the Way Your (and Your Clients) Think About Your Time Here’s the big change. It’s time to think hard about the way you and your clients view your time. As a freelancer, you probably know very well that many clients view you as an unlimited well of time and attention. They’re not intentionally disrespecting your time, they just don’t necessarily think about the fact that you might have other clients, need a break, or maybe to eat from time to time. Managing the expectations of clients is one of the most useful tools in reclaiming lost time. In order to do that, you might need to rethink things yourself. There are a few ways you can change these points of view. Two big ones come down to hours versus project tracking, and office hours. Hourly Compensation Or Project Compensation? Freelancers often work by an hourly rate, which can be a mistake. Clients can take this to mean that they’re entitled to as much time as they will pay for. As long as they’re paying, you should be at their beck and call. That’s why switching to an emphasis on projects, not hours can be such a critical change in your freelance lifestyle. A project contract can outline exactly what services, support, and hours a client can reasonably expect. It helps you to enforce a degree of professional separation, forcing them to think of your work as a project, not just the result of a remote wage slave. This will also stabilize your financial planning and invoicing. And About Those Office Hours . . . Office hours are the next step in reclaiming time lost to emails, phone calls,questions and demands. Establish a set of office hours (even if you work at home â€" your computer is your office). The crucial thing to note is that your office hours are not “I work from X until X.” Office time should be “I am available to take questions between X and X.” Do you see the difference? Only tell a client that you’re available during time that you specifically set aside for communications. Make it a reasonable window of a few hours, especially if you have international clients, but never, ever, make it your entire workday. If you get an email or phone call outside of office hours, ignore it until those hours next begin. Have a voicemail greeting that politely re-affirms your office hours so that clients who call outside of them know what to expect. You’ll have to be firm about this, and deal with some unhappy people, but if a client can’t be trained to respect your office hours, it’s time to fire them. Let us know how these strategies work out for you. Have you tried them before? What are your experiences? If you have thoughts or tips to add, let the world learn from you! This guest post was authored by  Brooke Faulkner Brooke Faulkner is a writer, mom and adventurer in the Pacific Northwest.  She spends her days pondering what makes a good leader, and dreaming up ways to teach these virtues to her sons creatively enough that she’ll get more than groans and eye rolls in response.

Making Money by Using Free Resume Templates

Making Money by Using Free Resume TemplatesThere are lots of resume templates online for free, but you can save money by making your own. While you don't have to pay for a professional job writing resume, you can make a difference in the cost of your resume by creating it yourself.Even full-time jobs these days have to be streamlined, and the result of this is that many companies are outsourcing. The goal of the outsourcing is to lower costs and find the best employees. Outsourcing has made it much easier for companies to find people with different skill sets, as well as looking for people who already have the skills they need.Resume templates will help you to do this, but they won't be able to do it all. For example, they can't tell you how to handle a complicated layout or tell you how to format your resume. You'll still have to come up with these details yourself and use them on your resume.While you can save money on your resume by creating it yourself, the investment can pay off . By coming up with an original idea that no one else has thought of, you will add value to your resume. People remember things that other people are not able to see. This means that even though you have taken the time to create a unique resume, you will still be competing against the hundreds of other applicants who have done exactly the same thing.The reason it is worth it to come up with some fresh ideas is that no one else will have created a similar template. If you get it right, you will get a lot of attention, and if you get it wrong, you'll get no attention at all.In order to write a good resume, you will need to create a variety of templates so that you can build a resume that caters for different types of job. Some resumes will be written for entry-level positions, while others will be written for mid-level positions.If you want to really make a difference in the look and feel of your resume, you should consider creating multiple resumes. If you write your own, you will kn ow exactly what type of applicant you are looking for. You can then focus on selling your services to that specific type of applicant.While you can get professional resume templates online for free, this isn't really the way to go if you want to create a personalized resume. The more time you put into creating your own, the better the end result will be.

Lead The Pack With Your Love For Social Media

Lead The Pack With Your Love For Social Media Can you use your social media savvy to help your career? I write a lot about using social media in job search, but now I want to share some thoughts on how and why your social media skills can help you while employed. The War For Talent Needs A Pro-Active Strategy In case you havent heard, companies are worried about losing disengaged employees and are complaining they cant find people to their job openings.  This is where you and your passion for social media come in. Be A Solution Maybe my post on US News World Report today will give you some ideas about how you can be the solution by stepping up to share your social media skills. What Im encouraging you to do is propose a social media recruitment strategy at your company. Important Data If you are looking for data to support your proposal, check these out. Bullhorn Reach Social Recruiting Reports Jobvite Social Recruiting Reports Trends QA I had the opportunity to interview Erin Osterhaus who  researches and reviews HR systems  via  Software Advice blog. Erin recently wrote an article featuring Twitters recruiting tips, How Twitter Uses Twitter to Recruit. I had some questions for Erin based on reading her article, and here they are with her answers. What if I am a small company with under 250 employees? Can I still reap the rewards of using Twitter to attract talent? Definitely. In fact, there might even be some hidden advantages to being a small company and recruiting on Twitter. Software Advice is relatively small, yet we still encourage our employees to Tweet out job postings and company news. However, unlike Twitter, we don’t have a corporate recruiting profile on Twitter. Instead, our two full-time recruiters have individual accounts which they use to Tweet postings and respond to potential applicants. We’ve found that this works better for us. Since we are a small company without the name recognition of a company like Twitter, allowing candidates to have personal interaction with our recruiters keeps them interestedsomething larger companies don’t have the time for. Is frequency of tweets a factor to growing followers? Yes. In my experience, growing your Twitter following has a direct correlation with how often you Tweet. I would recommend Tweeting at least two to three times per day. There are great tools out there like Tweetdeck, that allow you to schedule multiple Tweets at once. I usually set aside an hour on Mondays to create the Tweets that I’ll post throughout the week. Do you think companies that are serious about using Twitter need to train their employees on best practices? Recruiters, and HR in general should train employees to avoid social media catastrophes (like what happened at KitchenAid). You should always be aware of what’s going on and develop a social media policy so employees are never confused about what is and isn’t allowed. What if a company doesnt have a great culture like Twitters does? Are there other things a company could share if they dont have photos of a cool yoga studio or mimosa bar? (Or maybe this might inspire a company to add more perks?!) Even if your company culture isn’t as “great” as Twitter’s, it still has one. You can share events that your company has participated in, conferences you’ve attended, or even cool projects you’re working on. If you’re honest about your company culture and can more or less accurately portray the environment potential applicants will be working in, then you’ll probably have more serious candidates apply anywayones who aren’t merely after the free mimosas. How are employees incentivized to share tweets? A lot of companies are now using software solutions that allow employees to automatically post open positions to their social media profiles. The link each employee posts has a unique URL that identifies their profile as the source of any subsequent application. At Software Advice, we use such a system, and our employees are rewarded with a $1,000 bonus if a successful new hire comes from one of their social media profiles. It’s a great way to encourage employees to get the word out. Thank you Erin! I appreciate your thoughts on recruiting using Twitter!

Managing Career Goals

Managing Career Goals Our career development revolves around our ability to grow. We need to grow both our soft skills and our hard skills to progress in our careers. Challenges in Measuring Skill Development At times it is easy to tell if we are positively developing those skills. For example, you take a training class on a piece of software and begin utilizing the software on the job. After a period of time, the basics of the software become second nature. Other skills, though, are harder to measure. Your annual review states that you need to improve your adaptability and flexibility. Besides your boss opinion, it can be difficult to compare one year to the next. Leadership, communication skills and so on can be challenging to establish a baseline and to measure. Choose the Skills to Develop What skills are you trying to develop this year? Keep the list reasonable. Individuals typically don’t have time to complete all their job tasks and develop multiple skill areas they targeted. If you list out too many areas to develop, you are likely to be overwhelmed and ignore all of them! Measure Your Progress How are you going to measure your improvement? It is possible that the skill development is on your official performance plan. At the end of the year, your manager will rate you on your skill development so make sure you understand how youll be measured. For true skill development, you cannot wait until the end of the year to review. So, set a few milestones throughout the year. For example, if you are trying to become a more clear and concise communicator in your writing, take time every few months to compare your writing and see if there is improvement. Ask the recipients of your writing for their opinion on your improvement and ways you could have done better. Routinely Solicit Feedback Asking for feedback is crucial in skill development. For example, if you are working on presentation skills, you can ask for feedback directly after a presentation. However, you don’t want to ask the generic question How did I do? Individuals will typically give you a positive and non-detailed response. Ask specific questions: Did I seem nervous? Did I use a lot of filler words? Was my volume appropriate? Did I have too much information on the slides? Did I speak too quickly or too slowly, etc? Now, you also don’t want to corner someone for 30 minutes peppering them with questions like this. Find individuals you trust to give you honest feedback. Let them know you are seeking honest feedback as a way to improve your speaking skills and you are really trying to improve. Then have a few questions ready that can help you illicit some specific feedback. Another point to mention is to be open to the feedback. Don’t debate with the individuals that their perceptions were incorrect. T his is a time to gather feedback. There may be some irrelevant items mentioned and that’s fine. You can easily sift through to the ones that are meaningful. Skill development takes work, but if it is a skill you truly want to improve on, its worth investing your time. The extra time now will pay dividends in the end.

Utilizing your networking connections pays off! - Hallie Crawford

Utilizing your networking connections pays off! I am very excited that my career coaching  client, Justin, recently landed a job interview. He has a background in financial services, moved to Atlanta over a year ago from Boston to get a fresh start on his life and career. Hes looking to transition into a completely new industry, lobbying, politics and public relations. This interview was for a position in that field. Because this is a new field for him, its especially exciting that he got the job interview. He landed this interview through a networking contact. Quick tip: Justins contact suggested that he should apply for this job. He did so and immediately let his networking connection know he had applied, so that person could call them and give them a heads up that he recommended Justin personally. Then, once Justin had not heard back from them about his application, he notified his contact. Then his networking contact made another call to check in on it for Justin. The interview was scheduled 2 days later. Time and time again I learn that it really is about who you know. Part of this is you need to leverage your networking connections and keep them posted on your progress. Dont just apply for the job and let it go. Ask them for additional help as needed. It can go a long way! Atlanta Career Coach P.S. If you would like more help with your job search and networking, be sure to check out our  Free Resources Page  today!

Career Opportunities in Spartanburg SC - Where You Can Get Them

Career Opportunities in Spartanburg SC - Where You Can Get ThemHaving a successful career in the marketing field is not a given, but it is possible to have a successful job as a business owner with Spartanburg SC job opportunities. Since so many people go back to school for their degree, you can look into many different types of degree options including a Bachelor's Degree, Master's Degree and MBA.Spartanburg SC has plenty of professional positions available in marketing and it is not hard to find them. If you are someone who is very interested in business and this industry, then you need to look into all types of different types of jobs that are available. A good resume writer can help you with this job search by helping you with your resume and offer you many great options.Most professionals and businesses that are looking for employees are looking for the best candidates they can find in Spartanburg SC. These people are well versed in this area and know all the resources in this p art of the country. These professionals have access to the best career opportunities and the best job positions that they can find in Spartanburg SC.Many times you can find this type of professional at local companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Sprint, Wendy's, etc. They have all the great information on how to find the best job opportunities in Spartanburg SC and how to apply for them. Many times the best companies will hire a few interns or students who are willing to work at free trial periods to learn the business and this will be a good way to get a job.It is a good idea to check out all the available jobs that are available and see if there are any specific positions that you would like to take or jobs that you would like to do. You can also check online to see if there are any openings for you.You can also look into all the great websites that will allow you to apply for some free jobs and apply for all of the different career opportunities in Spartanburg SC. This will help you m ake sure that you get the best job openings and the best opportunities in the area. Getting a resume done and having the right business in the right position can make all the difference in a lot of peoples lives.If you have never had a resume written before, then this is a great way to make sure that you get the type of resume that will help you get the job that you want. The resume that you can get done for you can help you get the job you want in a short amount of time.

Tips when Writing Resume: No Longer a Mystery

Tips when Writing Resume: No Longer a Mystery Lies You've Been Told About Tips when Writing Resume Some Quick Tips When Making Your Cover Letter When you are producing your letter, you need to to begin with make sure it has short paragraphs and sentences. There are plenty of websites with tips around the internet, but most bring just a small number of them. Utilizing a student resume template can help you save you time and effort and offer you ideas on which sections to include and the way to complete them to be able to pull in the proper employers. What the In-Crowd Won't Tell You About Tips when Writing Resume Human Resources professionals review your federal resume to find out whether you satisfy the qualifications mentioned in the job announcement for the position which you're applying. Actually, you should talk with faculty and career advisors in your field no matter what, but here are some fundamental principles developed to assist you begin. If you're asking for a j ob which has unique requirements, you might need another edition of your resume to totally demonstrate your qualifications. Because resumes have limited space, your career objective should be concise. Getting the Best Tips when Writing Resume It's vital that you comprehend the needs of the job and address them on your resume. Analyze job ads You will discover a lot of helpful info on job ads. It's also important to politely reject work which you don't wish to accept. Even in case you have accepted work over the telephone, it is a great notion to compose work acceptance letter to verify the facts of employment and to formally accept the work offer. There's a difference between tweaking your resume to stay current and viable, and lying to obtain work. When it has to do with creating the work letter, you wish to make certain it signs as a diamond, as opposed to all the other lumps of coal that's around! Attempt to comprehend the market of the organization you are asking for work, and identify what type of difficulties they may be going through. Don't simply compose the keywords in, consider the times when you've demonstrated the necessary skills. Learn about the three kinds of skills it is possible to highlight and the way you're able to incorporate them into your resume. There's an abundance ofdifferent kinds of resumes and it can be tough to pick. Skills-based resumes may also enable you to combine related work and other experience during the skills-based headings.