Photo courtesy of chrismeller

Being productive in the long term is always a challenge in the tough work environment of the 21th century, no matter whether you are a freelancer or work in a coporate setting.
Today’s financial crisis does certainly not help to make one’s life easier, with long-term job security being a thing of the past for most industries. Therefore, it is sometimes a good idea to take a step back and rethink the way you work.

Steven Snell has a nice article about how to be productive at www.FreeLanceSwitch.com. Although gear more towards freelancer, he has some very valid points to make.

Among his most important areas to focus on are (among others)

• Goals
• Email/Communication
• Tasks
• Time Management
• Organisation

Let me just higlight a few few aspects:

online casino netHave a Long-Term Plan

Freelancers can easily get caught in the rut of moving from one job to the next and focusing only on the short-term. If this is the case, you’ll probably find yourself growing decreasingly satisfied with your work at some point. Freelancing is no different than any other career in that you need to have a long-term plan. A long-term plan can guide you in the short-term by helping you to make decisions that will get you to where you want to be.

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Align Your To-Do Lists with Your Goals

Getting things done is great, but ultimately what’s important is that you’re working towards your goals. When setting up your to-do list, take a look at your goals and develop the to-do list in a way that will lead you to the accomplishment of your goals.

Very valid points, indeed. However, he falls short to answer the question how you best implement his recommendation in your daily life. “Align your tasks with your goals”? Most software tools in the market just do not cover these aspects. But there is help.

We will start a series of online tutorials illustrating how you can implement self-management best practice with the help of DAISHO, the integrated self management tool by DAISHO Blacksmith. (I’m one of the creators of DAISHO, so don’t wonder why we are focussing here on it )

Use a Contact Manager

As a freelancer you’ll definitely be in contact with a lot of people. Keeping everything straight and be a chore. A contact manager [...] will help you to keep track of everyone while saving time for more productive tasks.

Yep, we will demonstrate how to do it with DAISHO as well. Stay tuned.

When you plan the conccrete steps how to reach your goals step by step, he suggests to consider these areas in your planning:

• Courses and workshops: From formal university instruction to extension classes to one-off events like seminars.
• Reading: Books, magazines, websites, newsletters, trade journals.
• Networking: Don’t neglect the value that building
  connections within your current niche or your desired one can bring.
  Figure out who in your field is worth following, and how to get close
  to them.
• Mentoring: A special kind of networking; consider asking a leader in your field to “take you under their wing”.
• Ride-alongs/shadowing: Hands-on experience is
  invaluable. Ask to spend a day with someone whose knowledge and skills
  you admire, learning their work from their perspective.
• Outreach: Form or join a group devoted to your topics.
• Reassignment/move to a new job: Ask your employer
  to shift you into a different department or position, or find work that
  better matches where you want to end up.

I just would add you should reserve the required time well in advance to avoid your short-term priorities are dominating your calendar. Budgeting time and scheduling time-slots in your calendar can help you with that.

See it as a continuous process, based on the following questions:

• What do I want to achieve?
• How do I get there? What actions do I have to take in order to achieve my goal?
• What resources (human, capital, etc) do I need?
• Which people (influencers, decision-makers) do I know?
• What is their role “in the game”?
• Am I well connected in my target industry?
• What do I have to do in the short-, mid- and long-term to improve my position?

Those questions will guide you through the process and hence, help you to achieve your goal. Setting up appropriate actions (in form of tasks and activities) and measures to come closer to your goal is just one part of the operational implementation in daily business. Building up and maintaining your social network is another important part. Knowing people and having connections is quite essential in today’s business world. It often opens doors for you or allows you to easier reach your goals.

Just a few hints from us how to successfully maintain and build up a social network:

Analyze and maintain your network!
What often happens is that due to daily business activities, we don’t have time to maintain and build up an adequate business network to keep our position. But this is essential, so take your time and analyze your network. If you keep in touch with your contacts (e.g. colleagues, business partners, and clients) and hence, maintain the relationship, you increase your chances reaching your goals: You get informal information early on, you have better chances for background information before even a formal bidding process is started or a project initiated. And, nothing beats the advantage of getting a personal recommendation by somebody in your network.

Build up a contact radar!
Cluster all relevant people that are relevant for you in terms of industry, position or functions and check, which of them you have not contacted for a while. Just think about it: isn’t it embarrassing to contact somebody from your network just in time to get a possible deal? Keep in touch even without a real business reason, provide them with helpful information, offer your support (like answering questions on an informal basis, without charging for the hour, of course!)

Keep the overview and don’t loose valuable contacts!

To illustrate how you can effectively set goal, I will take our pyramide that you already know from my last article.

In practice, it is common that you have different contexts where you assign your goals to. Contexts are subject areas that are seperated from each other, for example acquisition, marketing, projects, sport, and further education. With the help of contexts, you are able to structure your goals, tasks, and projects more effectively and hence, keep an overview of your current and future activities.

Once you have allocated your goals to contexts, you can start breaking them down into subgoals or milestones, as we call it. Knowing what actions it takes to achieve your goal, you should roughly plan your work capacity by setting time budgets. Those time budgets tell you how much time you are planning to spend for which project. Now, you have to schedule your activities, meaning that you have to allocate the time budgets of your context to each single workday. Now, you know exactly how much time you are planning to spend for each context. The tartget-performance comparison shows you how exactly your rough planning through time budgets matches with the more detailed planning (scheduling).

Monitoring the process and of course, the results of your goal achievement is hereby essential in all three stages. That’s the approach we have also implemented in our software.

Once you have understood this approach (and you act according to it), you will see that setting and achieving goals become easier. Let me explain with the help of the graphic below how this works.

First of all, you should keep in mind those three different stages when setting goals. Each stage is different and therefore, requires another approach. If you want to achieve your goals successfully, you have to break them down into several subgoals. Those subgoals can be seen as milestones in project management. The “project” hereby is to achieve the goal. Just an example to illustrate this. If your goal is to become a freelancer and start up your own business, you have to take different actions in order to put this goal into action. Office established and setting an IT infrastructure up and running are two milestones in this example in order to come closer to the goal.

Similar to a project, you define a starting point and a deadline for your subgoal and you assign specific tasks and actions to it. Hereby, it is also important to set priorities for each goal. This simplifies your goal achievement.

In the next step, you have to think of appropriate tasks and activities in your daily business that helps you accomplish your goal. During this approach, monitoring the results and process of goal achievement is important.

You can do it on paper. But with the proper tool it is more convenient. In the next article, I will demonstrate how to integrate this approach into your daily business using DAISHO.