Procrastination – The bane of a freelancer’s existance

This week I have find myself getting a little bit bored doing my freelancing work.

Productivity is variable, you can’t be productive all the time, and forcing yourself to be is fighting human nature. There’s nothing wrong with having a week that is not so productive. There is nothing wrong with a week where you feel a bit burnt out and can’t really concentrate.

When faced with times like this, the best thing we can do as freelancers is to blow off working and go do something else. The worst thing we can do as freelancers is to try and battle on, always seemingly trapped between procrastination and doing a boring job slowly.

I’m a huge critic of working 9-5. I have worked exactly 109 days where I had to arrive at 9 and leave at 5. So I may not be an expert on working 9-5, but I can tell you now that I AM an expert at getting a lot of awesome work done and NOT working 9-5.

This is what I know of inspiration and productivity:

• You can’t control it – it comes and gos
• When you’re in the zone, you get about four to five times as much done as your average desk worker at 3pm
• Having a good routine helps productivity, but only to a certain point
• Life is all about Balance
• Working too hard now is going to cause burnout later. Different people have differing levels of work they can do before burning out.

I’ve also been on the other side of the fence – I outsource a lot of work. As a buyer of labour I know that:

• I couldn’t give a rats how long it takes you to do something
• I don’t care if you do it at 3pm or 3am
• I only care about RESULTS

Tips for freelancers

• Stop measuring your inputs (time spent) and start measuring your outputs (stuff done)
• It’s better to work 3 hours while you’re in the zone and enjoying your work than work 12 hours while bored
• Don’t try and force your productivity to fit into your schedules, but ride it like a wave
• Don’t fall into pressure that you have to work longer. You don’t need to keep up with people that work 12 hours a day. Instead work less – but work smarter and harder. Work 4 hours 3 times as hard. Or, if your inspiration and productivity waves come like mine, work 60 hours in 4 days then take it easy and just answer emails for a week. That 60 hours of “in the zone” work, is probably equal to 150 hours of uninspired work.

Procrastination

Getting back to the point about procrastination… I’ve found that procrastination occurs when I’m uninspired and I’m trying to do work.

I hate hate hate procrastination for a number of reasons:

• It’s a waste of time
• If I’m uninspired, I’m uninspired – I can’t help it
• It’s false work. People like to say “I worked hard for that car”, but if they procrastinate, it’s a lie.
• Procrastination is a way to fill time when you feel like you should be working

But my number one reason for hating procrastination is this. As people, we are creatures of habit and repetition. Some of us moreso than others, but at the end of the day, we still prefer certain things done in certain ways. Procrastinating once makes it easier to procrastinate a second time. And then… all of a sudden, you always procrastinate.

The perfect workspace is a sacred workspace. They are places for work and work only.

Once you install some video games on your work laptop, it becomes that much easier to play them when you should be working.

Once you get up late once, it becomes easier to always start late.

Once your partner comes into your workspace to ask you for something once, it becomes that much easier for them to do it again.

Once you procrastinate and waste time in your workspace, it becomes so much easier to do it again.

A workplace is sacred. To get the most out of it, you have to cleanse it of all distractions, and the very act of going to your workspace is part of a routine that jolts productivity.

So just like you tell your partner to ask you for things at a more convenient time, and just like you uninstall video games from your work laptop, so should you leave the office immediately when you start procrastinating.

So now that I’ve finished this blog post, I can feel myself heading into ProcrastinationTown. I’m going home early.

Related posts:

• Blow off work or blow at work
• The difference between good freelancers and bad freelancers
• All about passive and diversified income for freelancers
• Outsourcing for freelancers
• Charging the right price: Price optimization for freelancers