The Organizational Quest: Pt 2 Willing to Change

I’d just like to thank everyone for helping my little blog reach over a thousand page views.

There has been a recent increase in activity on here. A small flurry of comments have started up on 101 Reasons to Continue Freelancing on the topic of getting a second job while working as a freelancer. I’d love to hear more from other visitors if you’d like to drop by.

I’ve also completed my seven day time log trial and calculated the results, to make the big change in my working life.

As you’ll see in the nifty charts below I worked anywhere from about 2 to 5 hours a day of real work and ended up with about a 26 hour workweek. The equivalent of a part time job, which makes sense since I’d only been earning the equivalent of a part time job in pay…

I also worked on 3 to 7 different projects a day. It seems like a lot but I’ve got a lot of little long term projects going on now so they don’t take up that much time. The problem seems to come in when I don’t get to those little project as soon as I wake up in the morning. I kept putting them off, so I never made it to the larger money making projects and ended up not getting to those little projects until close to midnight. On my little chart by the way days 6 and 7 would be my bad days by the way. Although none of the days were particularly inspiring.

Anywho, I also noticed when looking at my time log, which I don’t have shown here because it’s very big and embarassing, I wasn’t efficient with those projects I did get to. Meaning I could have gotten more work done on each project I got to and I could have finished my smaller daily projects much faster most of the time.

For instance, there is a blog that I post to daily for some clients. On some days I found it only took me about 15 minutes to get the research and the blog post done, on other days it took me up to an hour because I was caught up in surfing the web or watching television. So in my new schedule I compromised and gave myself half an hour each day to get it done.

Making up a daily schedule can seem really high school-ish, but it helps set the mind and body to a specific routine. Thus if I stick to it, I’ll be more efficient and get done sooner each day.

To figure out how long each work day will be for me I calculated the average amount of time I spent on each of the projects I touched on during the 7 day time log period.

My ideal average day came to about 6 and a half hours. However, I can’t expect to work solidly 6 hours without a break. Even a 9-to-5 job usually gives about 2 hours in breaks over the course of the day. So I interspered my new schedule with breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack breaks. Since I work at home the ‘working’ day can run longer with longer breaks between projects. My lunch break is 2 hours long, hee, hee, hee. : )

This also gives me some free time during the middle part of the day, which was a time period during which I noticed I ended up having to run a lot of family errands.

I started the new schedule on September 28th so its been about a week and I plan on trying this for 30 days to see how it goes. If you want to learn more about the 30 Day Plan check out StevePavlina.com. Already there is an increase in efficiency and productivity, even though I’m still adjusting to it. To be honest, I’m still not waking up at exactly 8:15 am each day, but I’ll get there.