Productivity strategies that work

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

Getting stuff done is crucial to succeeding as a freelancer: you need to earn money, and you need to meet your deadlines. Productivity is a very personal thing, and it’s a topic I think about a lot. Even when you love your job (which I do!):

• You still have to do things you don’t love, or even things that you hate (hello, accounting)
• It’s always great to earn more, in less time, by working more efficiently
• Thinking about productivity can teach you a lot about how your brain works, which in turn can help you in other areas of life

Step one: A couple of excellent resources

When it comes to productivity, and lots of other things in life, we rarely ask the question: Why? Why do I put off certain tasks? Why do certain tasks feel really easy? Why do I feel really motivated to do some things, and I dread or avoid others? Here are two resources to start with, when you’re trying to answer those questions:

1. Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies personality framework. I am really, really not a personality test kind of person. Myers-Briggs…ugh. But I really love the Four Tendencies framework, because it helps you understand why you (and other people) do (or don’t do) the things you do (or don’t do). You’re identified as one of four types: Upholder, Rebel, Questioner, or Obliger, and I have honestly found this whole concept so helpful. I’m an Upholder: if you tell me to do something, I’m going to do it, and if I tell myself to do something, I’m going to do it; I also struggle to find joy or meaning in activities that don’t have an outcome or a purpose, I have trouble letting go of something I’ve committed to doing, even if I no longer want to do it, and I tend to have little patience with people who can’t just “get it done.” Every type has its advantages and disadvantages; I highly recommend figuring out what type you are, before diving into any productivity initiative!
2. Dorothee Racette’s blog, Take Back My Day. Dorothee is a German<>English translator and past ATA President turned productivity coach, and her stuff is also super-helpful. She really digs into the question of Why: Why procrastination is about managing your perspective, not managing time, Why freelancers with ADHD may not benefit from standard productivity advice, and more. Check out her materials if you haven’t already (not an affiliate deal!).

Six productivity strategies to try

As mentioned above, hitting the productivity sweet spot depends on a lot on how your brain works. Start there! After that, here are six things I’d recommend trying:

1. Swallow the frog. Do the least appealing task first. Sometimes, I boost this strategy by depriving myself of coffee until I do the dreaded thing. At least 98.5% of the time, I’ve spent more time avoiding the task than it actually takes to do it. I’m particularly avoidant about accounting and tax tasks, so I implement this strategy for those types of things.
2. Bribe yourself. If you market to one new client every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, then on Friday, you get to go to your favorite café as soon as you’re done with work.
3. Sprint. Whether it’s a power hour or a 25-minute Pomodoro, this technique really helps me. Something about the defined period of time makes it less intimidating.
4. Go all-in, for a set number of days. This is kind of the underlying concept of any challenge group: you don’t have to keep up with the habit forever, but by ingraining it for something like 30 days, you’ll probably stick with it in some capacity even after the group is done. Setting a really ambitious goal that you only have to stick with for 30 days can be great, because you can pick something you’d never stick with otherwise. For example, market to five clients every weekday (25 clients in one month…probably more than you did in all of last year!).
5. Outsource judiciously. Hiring an accountant and a website manager frees me up to earn money doing what I’m good at, so that I can pay them to do what they’re good at. Don’t think of this purely in terms of hourly rate (my accountant charges a lot more than I do!), think of it in terms of how many hours it would take for you to do what they do. In the case of accounting, I’m probably 3-4x slower than my accountant, and I hate the work!
6. Identify your highest and lowest-energy times of the day or week and, to whatever extent you can, work around them. I am honestly neither a morning person nor a night person (I just love to sleep!), but I find it almost impossible to work on cognitively intensive work at night. If work bleeds over into the evening, I try to save the least intensive work for the evening. Some people’s “golden hour” is Sunday afternoons; for some, it’s 5 AM. Capitalize on that as much as you can.

Finally: a bonus mindset tip. A while ago, I heard a really great interview with Mark McGuinness, the author of Productivity for Creative People. I don’t actually consider myself very creative, but I loved his key point: think of productivity (with the tasks you don’t love: accounting, marketing, answering non-critical e-mail, cleaning off your desk, IT maintenance) as what frees you up to spend as much time as possible on the things you do love. I really liked that!

I hope these tips are helpful in your own productivity efforts! Have a great week!