March 19, 2024

Thrive Insider

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How to Manage Your Freelance Workload

When you are a freelancer, you have the constant issue of successfully managing your workload in the back of your mind. Part of this comes down to ensuring that you have enough work on at all times, but when you have plenty, you need to be confident that you are able to juggle your conflicting priorities easily. With this as a starting point, here are just a few of the ways that you can better manage your freelance workload. 

Utilize technology to find your workload 

Finding work is the first step to managing your freelance workload. No matter what type of business you work in, you will find technology and websites that help you easily find work. When you work freelance in shipping work, for example, there is a technology that can make managing trucking work incredibly easy: Truck load tools. With this, you search for the jobs that you want to take on, place a quote for how much you want to earn from this job, and then carry it out. 

Work out your best workload management tool 

There are some people who prefer to manage workloads the old-fashioned way and simply write them down – along with the deadline. There are also those that prefer to use an Excel spreadsheet to do it instead. Of course, there are all sorts of modern workload management tools out there, and it is certainly going to be worth making the most of these – even if you just try them out and decide that they are not for you. These can potentially unlock new ways of working, which are more than worth it. 

Note that if you are within the trucking business and utilizing truck load technology, you will receive booking confirmation of every load you accept containing the information in an email. You can find a storage solution for this or transfer the information to one of the above tools. 

Know your limits 

First of all, you need to know exactly how much work you are able to take on. When people first go freelance, they often fall into the trap of accepting any and every job out there, whether this is in trucking work or content writing. However, this can lead to having too much on your plate, and you are not able to do them all with the level of seriousness that is deserved. Also, you will not have enough of an occasion to relax and unwind, which is always going to be a problem as a freelancer. The longer that you go down this path, the more likely it is that you will find success and the sense of balance that you are looking for. 

Communicate with clients 

A big part of managing your workload successfully comes down to ensuring that you are in constant communication with your clients. While some of them are going to be strict about deadlines, there are plenty more that are more than willing to move things around if you give them enough notice. However, if you simply allow the deadlines to slide without telling them, this is where it is more likely to lead to disappointment and the potential for them not to use your services again. 

Reassess your priorities Depending on your workload and how much you have on at the moment, you can easily find that you need to reassess your priorities and juggle everything around. Ultimately, this can be an ongoing task, but one that provides a great deal of value to what you are doing.