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8 Proven Ways to Turbo-Charge Your Productivity

Have you been feeling a little unproductive lately? Well, you are not the only one. Of course, we all want to be as productive as possible at work, but that’s not always the case.

According to recent research, we are fully productive for less than 3 hours a day. Stress and poor planning are just two of the reasons why. And this is true in all work environments. No one is exempt from this problem, from employees in central offices to freelancers or managers working from home.

That’s why we have researched and selected the eight best ways to increase your productivity at work. In our search for solutions to boost creativity, we have come across numerous promising approaches and tips that you can use. Here are the best tips you can follow to get the most out of a workday:

1. Plan your Tasks

I can safely say that there is nothing more important than efficient task planning. Planning your tasks can free you from stress and procrastination. Planning everything before the day even starts is probably the best approach.

This is also where time management comes into play. Think about it. How often have you been more productive after setting a specific time frame for a task? You need to plan for the project at hand and then map each workday.

The more you plan your projects and workdays, the more productive you will be. However, it would help if you tried not to spend hours and hours planning.

2. Minimize Distractions

So you have successfully planned your tasks. That should be enough to be productive, right? Well, unfortunately, no. Whether you work in the office or from home, numerous things can distract you daily.

Distractions are ubiquitous, from a colleague wanting to chat about last night’s game to TV at home. When you minimize such distractions, you become better at what you do.

Of course, it’s not always easy to resist temptation. But if you do, you’ll spend more hours focused and engaged in your task. The same goes for leadership positions. You can ask your employees to turn off their cell phones and minimize chats.

We all feel the need to check our phones or chat with our colleagues. This is precisely why the next tip is crucial to your productivity.

3. Take Regular Breaks

According to psychologists, taking regular breaks at work will help you minimize stress and thus improve your performance. Whether you work from home or at headquarters, relaxing and social breaks are necessary. But that’s not all.

As we mentioned earlier, regular breaks are a smart way to avoid distractions. If you know your next break is coming up, you will not need to chat or look at your phone.

This will help you maintain a high level of concentration. On the other hand, if you do not take regular breaks, your performance will continue to decline throughout the day.

4. Stop Multitasking

Once you have scheduled your tasks and breaks, it’s time to think about the actual work process. Contrary to what many believe, multitasking does not make you more productive.

Conversely, multitasking can decrease your performance, drain your energy faster, or even damage your brain. This is another reason why planning is so important. You should always try to engage your brain with one task at a time.

5. Optimize Workplace Conditions

This is one of the most efficient but often underestimated ways to increase productivity. Ensuring that the working temperature is between 20-24 degrees C (68 and 76 degrees F) will help you stay concentrated for more extended periods.

This will also save you a lot of time, whether at home or in the office. On the other hand, if you feel cold or hot, you will be distracted. Therefore, you should think about the working temperature before you start working.

6. Enough Sleep is Key

It’s not news that sleep deprivation can affect our performance. And that’s not just it. Lack of sleep leads to a massive decrease in:

  • Ability to concentrate
  • Working memory
  • Mathematical capacity
  • Logical reasoning

So sleep is crucial to our overall well-being. According to the National Sleep Foundation, you should try to get between 7 and 8 hours of sleep a night (for adults between 18 and 65).

It becomes evident that getting enough sleep is one of the best ways to increase your productivity at work.

7. Communication is Crucial

Communication is essential, especially for those of you who work from home. You should always have a conversation with the people you live with during your breaks. This can also help you avoid distractions during your work hours.

Try to make everyone around you (including yourself) understand what closed, and open doors mean. This will help you increase your productivity while communicating sufficiently with your loved ones.

The same goes for people who work in offices. You should always try to engage with your colleagues during breaks. Remember that feeling part of a group and sharing your experiences is the key to increasing your productivity.

8. Avoid Social Media

Our last tip is one of the hardest to follow, especially working from home. You may think that this is not a problem for you. Recent studies show that we spend an average of 145 minutes on social media every day. Of course, it’s not a bad idea to cut down on that time.

But, even if you do not, you should try to keep any engagement with social media outside of your work hours. This will help you focus on your tasks and get you one step closer to your goals.

Wrap Up

Keep in mind that we all get stuck at times when working on a project. The more you worry about it, the more stressed you will be. It’s essential to take care of yourself and your mental health. In any case, we hope you will find it easier to increase your productivity now that you have read our tips. All you have to do is follow them.

Featured image via Pexels.

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The post 8 Proven Ways to Turbo-Charge Your Productivity first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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8 Freelance Project Management Apps for 2021+

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In my experience, the biggest challenge that freelancers face — more than winning clients or setting prices — is project management; take on too much work, and you’ll start missing deadlines, take on too little, and you’ll start missing your rent.

Some people are naturally organized; they rock up at their desk at 08:59, fully confident in what they will spend the next 8–12 hours working on. Let’s be kind and say that I am not one of them, and leave it at that. The only way I have managed to survive the industry is by self-consciously micro-managing my schedule on a daily basis.

When I worked in an agency, I knew what I would be working on days in advance. Now, I know 90% of what I’ll be working on, weeks in advance.

That level of organization requires very, very, very careful planning. I hold team meetings at the end of the day, yes, “team” meetings of one person. To do that I use a number of tools that suit me.

How to Choose a Project Management App

The most important aspect of any project is the end. That’s when the client will assess your work, and that’s when you get paid. So when you choose a project management solution, make sure it gives you a clear path to the project conclusion.

I know one freelancer who sets himself a hard stop at 7 pm every day. At 7 pm, he downs tools switches off, and walks away. I once heard him end a client call at 7 pm because he’d reached his cut-off point. It made me wince — I would have stayed on until the call concluded — but it hasn’t affected his business.

I know another successful freelancer who works on a budget. When she has earned the money she needs for that day, she stops. She bills by the hour to make this work, so when she sits down in the morning, she knows exactly what time she’ll finish.

Personally, I prefer a task-based approach. I know what I have to get done; if I can get ahead, then great, but my main focus is ensuring I don’t fall behind. I believe that if you hit your deadlines, everything else will take care of itself. Admittedly, there have been a few late-nights (and all-nights) over the years, but thankfully they’re less common these days.

No one style of project management suits everyone. And it doesn’t matter what approach you take, provided you take an approach.

8 Best Project Management Apps for Freelancers

As a freelancer, the most important thing characteristic you can have is reliability. Cultivate a reputation for delivering on your promises, and you’ll become invaluable to your clients. The best project management app is the one that helps you keep your promises.

There are some excellent tools on the market that facilitate project management, but most are aimed at SMEs, or project managers running a team of freelancers.

The tools here are listed from least, to most useful for the average freelancer. I’ve avoided too many time-tracking apps because I find these tend to encourage billing by the hour, which is potentially damaging to your business long term. If you do need pure time-tracking, check out Harvest. I’ve also avoided solutions that are too large-scale to benefit freelancers. If you’re looking for a project management tool for teams, then Basecamp, Jira, Project.co, and Redbooth are all worth considering.

Sadly none of these apps are perfect, and there’s a good chance you’ll need to use two or three to manage your projects.

8. Todoist

Todoist is hands down the best to-do app on the market. The downside is that its feature set is minimal.

Todoist really excels at lists. You can break down tasks into sub-tasks, and sub-sub-tasks. The downside is there’s no real scheduling or comparison of multiple projects in a single view.

The mobile apps are great, and Todoist recently introduced boards, a form of kanban board that gives you a good overview of everything. If it introduces a gantt chart, I can see myself relying on it more.

Todoist has a free forever plan that is fine for most freelancers, and the paid plans start at just $3 per month.

7. Bonsai

Bonsai is an excellent service for freelancers that grew from a simple invoicing app to include proposals, contracts, time-tracking, and more.

I used Bonsai for invoicing for a couple of years, and it does everything it claims to do. However, there are a couple of significant areas where it falls down. Firstly, its invoicing is super-aggressive and cannot be customized — make sure you’re on friendly terms with any client you send a Bonsai invoice to. Secondly, while it does a good job of tracking what you have done, it doesn’t help you plan what needs to be done beyond a formal proposal.

If you’re running a few simple projects, then it’s possible Bonsai is right for you. Pricing starts at $19 per month.

6. Monday

Monday is one of the biggest players in the project management market. It offers a dizzying array of options, and if this list were aimed at project management for agencies, Monday would be further along our countdown. Monday may suit freelancers, particularly those who have migrated from agency work, but for most, it’s more than we need.

There is a free-forever plan that covers almost everything you could want. However, if you need to view your projects as a gantt chart — and I strongly suggest you do — then you’ll need to update to the standard plan, which starts at $8 per user per month, with a minimum of three seats, meaning at least $24 per month when billed annually.

5. AND.CO

AND.CO stands out as a slick, easy-to-use option for managing a freelance business. Like Bonsai, it allows you to manage proposals, invoicing, time-tracking, expenses, and more.

AND.CO also has extremely well-liked customer support. An underestimated consideration when you don’t have your own accounts team to resolve problems.

As with other solutions of this type, the task-management is lacking. It does include a simple to-do list, but in my opinion, it’s not sufficient, and you’ll need to supplement it with something that supports gantt charts.

There’s a free forever plan, but it’s barely more than a free trial. Pricing for full-featured access starts at $18 per month when billed annually.

4. ClickUp

ClickUp is a SaaS that aims to replace just about everything else you could need. Unlike some options on this list, it includes a CRM, which is a bonus because there’s nothing worse than relying on the search function in your email to track down someone’s contact details.

ClickUp also offers a genuinely free-forever account with enough features to make it usable. If you choose to upgrade to a paid plan, it’s just $5 per user per month, which is excellent value.

If anything, there’s just too much in here. If you’re someone who considers themselves a power-user who enjoys digging into every nuance of a UI, then ClickUp could be for you. But, if, like me, you favor a simple tool that does what it’s told and gets out of the way, then there are better options.

3. Asana

Asana is probably the best-known project management tool on the market. It offers a tremendous number of options and is flexible enough for any style of project management.

There’s a free forever plan that is ideal for getting started and offers you most — you may be sensing a theme here — of the features you’ll need. But Asana’s best feature is its excellent timeline implementation of the gantt chart, for which you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan costing $10.99 per user per month, with a minimum number of 2 seats that translates to a rather expensive $21.98 per month.

2. Trello

Trello is famous for its kanban boards, and many people prefer them to gantt charts, which has helped the app grow rapidly in the last few years.

If you’re prepared to pay $10 per user per month, Trello actually offers gantt charts as well, in the form of its timeline feature.

Trello is mainly designed for teams, not freelancers. However, if you do have the budget for a premium plan, Trello gives you an enviable ability to switch project management styles on a whim.

1. Toggl

Toggl is perhaps the perfect balance of time-tracking and gantt chart that is ideal for freelance projects.

As with most tools, Toggl is designed for teams, with billing starting at $8 per user per month. However, it offers a solo plan, designed for freelancers, that is free forever.

The main thing you miss out on with Toggl’s Solo plan is team timelines, which you won’t need unless you’re outsourcing work. One other obvious omission is unlimited planning boards, which you may find yourself paying for sooner or later.

But for a mixture of simplicity and powerful features available for $0, Toggl is hard to beat.

 

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The post 8 Freelance Project Management Apps for 2021+ first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.


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How Long do You Code Per Coding Session?

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I was working on getting the latest DataStax Enterprise 6 up and running via the Docker Image offerings today and I stumbled across a site called hashnode.com. On that site was a harmless little question, but something I realized I ponder a lot, and even find myself in conversation about on a regular basis. The question is posed,

"How many minutes/hours do you really sit to write code at a particular moment?

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Time Wasters in Project Management

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A project’s success stems from a number of things. Among others, it includes sensible planning, professionalism of the team members and individual productivity levels.

Nevertheless, there are certain aspects to almost every project that take more time than planned. This leads to missed deadlines and incomplete task scopes. Do you remember the last time your project met the deadlines? In this article, we are going to discuss three central problems with project time.

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