Use Your Time Wisely: How to Maximize Your Productivity as a Freelancer

Delivering results for clients is crucial to freelancing. Whether you’re brand new to freelancing or a seasoned pro, without client satisfaction, you might as well pack it up and go home. Showing clients that they can count on you to be capable and efficient means that they’ll turn to you for future projects.

Balancing your clients and projects is what will determine your success as a freelancer. Having the right freelancing tools is a big part of being able to deliver for clients.

Since freelancing is different for everyone, you need to figure out what works best for you. Communication, organization, and collaboration are critical parts of successful and productive freelancing. When you evaluate your productivity, keep those three elements in mind.

Keep Up With Communication

To provide a good client experience and to market yourself to potential clients, you need good communication skills. Communication is a big part of making your current clients happy and working with new ones.

Keeping up with emails, chats, message threads, and virtual calls can be tricky these days. It’s frustrating to manage all the different ways people use to communicate. Even the main ways of communicating, like email, are hard to keep up with because they’re hard to organize.

It’s easy to leave a client or collaborator off an email string, or for an email to get buried in an inbox folder. Even if you stay on top of your inbox, email is only one tool out of the many you need to manage your projects.

Rock keeps all the freelancing tools you need in one place. You can send messages, add notes, set up a Zoom meeting, link your Google Drive, and manage your tasks without ever leaving Rock. Add your notes from calls or virtual meetings with clients to the designated project space in Rock.

That way, you or your client can reference them later. Your clients can check in on progress for a real-time update on the project with Rock’s built-in task boards.

If you’re a graphic designer, use Rock’s built-in task board to keep your client and collaborators updated on a project. Your client can comment on tasks to ask a question, provide feedback on designs, update deadlines, or send a quick chat—all in Rock.

With your communication centralized in one hub, you won’t have to search inboxes to reference or re-share information with clients. After you streamline communication, you won’t need to juggle so many different tools to keep up.

Get (And Stay) Organized

Staying organized at work helps you successfully manage your freelancing projects. It’s a key element of any work— especially freelancing— because organization makes it easier to adapt to different projects, deadlines, and clients.

No freelancing projects are the exact same. A client might ask you to work with another freelancer on a big project or on something that’s partially outside your skillset. Other times, you might be delivering a straightforward asset. Whatever the client needs, staying organized is key to your ability to deliver.

Make a working schedule and set routines so you can keep a healthy work-life balance. Making sure that you don’t bite off more than you can chew is another important part of staying organized. Taking on too many projects leads to serious stress and burnout.

It’s bad for you and bad for your freelancing clients who are counting on the quality of your work. You should also make sure to centralize your work as much as you can. When you freelance, you work with a lot of moving parts.

Centralizing your tools, projects, and communication in one place helps you manage your freelancing work. Most importantly, it reduces stress for you.Without a hub for your work, you’ll have to use a bunch of tools and platforms—like Slack, Trello, Figma, Google Drive, and email—to communicate and work.

That’s a lot to manage and you’ll have a tough time staying on top of things without an organizational method. This is especially true for freelancers since you’re always working with multiple clients and projects.

You can create a space in Rock for a specific project and invite anyone to join. This helps to streamline your work and communication, freeing you up to focus on what needs to get done. Create a space for each of your freelance projects so you can keep track of everything without ever switching to another app or tool.

If you’re a freelance copywriter, you can link your Google Drive folders to a space in Rock. Then your drafts are organized in the space that’s dedicated to that project. Once the folder is linked, your clients and any collaborators can easily review drafts and give you feedback.

Whether you need to jump on a quick Zoom call, assign a task, or send a chat—everything you need is in Rock. After you find an organizational approach that works, you can spend more of your working hours on your freelancing projects.

Streamline Your Collaborations

To keep a steady stream of projects moving, freelancers need to stay on their toes. It’s critical to have prospective projects and clients at all times. Working with your clients shouldn’t be a hassle (for you or them), whether you’re asking for a meeting or asking for feedback.

Since freelancers work with a wide variety of people, you often need a wide variety of tools. Some are open to everyone, like email. Others limit you to only the people in an organization or certain email addresses. You lose valuable time while navigating the growing number of tools, platforms, and apps.

To save time (and stress), centralize your collaborations and projects in one place as much as you can. That way, you’ll have to worry about less. You’ll also be able to spend less time switching between tools.If you’re a freelance web developer, you likely have to collaborate with a lot of people on projects.

With Rock, you don’t have to worry about someone being left out of the loop again since you can add clients, collaborators, or team members. Rock is open to everyone, just like email, but the project-based spaces keep your work more organized than an inbox. You can invite anyone to join your space.

After you add someone to a space in Rock, they’ll be able to access all of the linked files, folders, notes, and tasks in that space.You can customize workflows and spaces to fit the client and the project. This helps you keep everything in one place and streamline the way you work.

By centralizing your different clients and projects in one place, you save time and make your day-to-day work a lot easier.

Do Your Freelancing Your Way

With Rock, you can create as many spaces as you need for your freelancing project and invite anyone. Rock also gives you unlimited messages, tasks, Google Drive folders, and files for free. You need space to work and Rock doesn’t put any limits on you.