News Tips & advice For professionals How do you increase your productivity on zzp assignments?
As a self-employed person, it is essential to plan your tasks well and distinguish between deep work, which is important to your business, and superficial work, such as administration. By planning your schedule accordingly, you can increase your productivity and get more results with less time.
Working as a self-employed person is something many people would love. Picking your own self-employed assignments and organizing your own time is, of course, also very nice. However, besides all the benefits, this way of working also comes with quite a few challenges. One of those challenges is your productivity. This determines to a considerable extent how much you earn, or how much time you spend. To get you started, we have listed 10 tips to help you be more productive.List your tasks
We start by making an overview of what you need to do. After all, if you plan in advance, you save yourself a lot of headaches, and getting tasks done becomes a lot easier. List all your tasks for the day, including the small tasks. Think of things like answering emails, calling people, appointments, small to-do tasks, and so on. This is the ideal start to good planning, which will ultimately lead to more productivity.
Differentiate between deep and superficial work
Roughly speaking, we can divide tasks into two categories, deep and superficial work. By deep work, then, we mean tasks that are important to the success of your business, and require quite a bit of concentration. Superficial work is tasks that also need to be finished, but are less important. For example, deep work is creating content, calling leads or producing a product or service. Superficial work can be answering emails, or doing administration. Make sure most of the day is spent on deep work, and schedule it at times when you are fresh and focused.
Estimate time per task
This seems like an easy, and perhaps even unnecessary, tip. However, it is not. It's more important and a lot harder than it seems. You can keep a stopwatch on certain tasks so you know how long certain work will take. Once you have done this a few times, you will know approximately how long a particular task will take. Next, always schedule a little more time per task, because unexpected things can happen and you also have to take into account starting and finishing.