I have come across some great time management and productivity resources, some of which I’ve been able to implement and some that just don’t work well for me. So what I’ve ended up doing is combining some of my favorites.

Here’s what I do:

Yearly Business Planning

At the end of 2008, I had written a blog post about setting goals for the new year. In that post, I mentioned Alice Seba’s Planning Calendar that breaks down your plans for the year into monthly, weekly, even daily chunks to make it easier to lay out your goals and then the actions you need to take to achieve those. I’ve been using it since 2009 started (although not as diligently as I should be) and its making a big difference. It helps me look ahead and schedule projects and ideas a few months from now instead of feeling like I have to do everything now.

Blog Planning

This is one that I still struggle with. Thanks to the Blog Planner I downloaded from Blog Energizer, I can plan my topics ahead of time and even set up a posting schedule for multiple blogs (last count: 4 active and 3 badly neglected blogs). Its a great little tool and I keep it in my binder so I can jot down topics that come to mind. Then at the beginning of each month, I come up with topics to fill in the blank spaces and voila! A month’s worth of blog topics.

But I’ve come to the realization that planning is not my problem. My problem is action. I can plan stuff out but when it comes down to budgeting my time and plugging those plans into a schedule, I can’t find a balance between adherence and flexibility.

Planners for Freelancers

Well today I was reading through all of my RSS feeds and saw that Charlie at Productive Flourishing published a freelancer’s version of his popular planner pages. I’m so excited to try it out! He’s been putting a lot of work into this and I know it wasn’t easy because “freelancer” can mean so many things and we all have very different ways of working. So finding something that will work for everyone is difficult. (I even donated a few bucks to encourage him and let him know his efforts were appreciated.)

So if you’re a freelancer, definitely head over to Productive Flourishing and download Charlier’s planner for freelancers. And even if you’re not a freelancer, Charlie’s original planners are an excellent resource too!

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• 50+ Ways to Improve Your Productivity as a Freelancer (freelanceswitch.com)
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• Four Forgotten Productivity Enhancers (kevineikenberry.com)

Related posts:

1. Goal Setting for the New Year
2. It’s that time of year
3. Update to “30 Articles in 30 Days”