Five Freelance Work Techniques

Almost a year ago, I became a freelancer, got a job at the American stock exchange odesk.com and began to work slowly. Over time, the number and complexity of orders grew, and of course I developed five methods of work.

I note that not everything is as simple as I described in the article, I understand perfectly well that there are many other factors, if there is a desire to invite in the comments to discuss them.

Modes or techniques depend on 7 factors:

1) A woman is the most important factor, as she decides everything.
2) Weather - either you bathe, or you sit at home drinking hot coffee, and outside the window there is snow / rain / women.
3) Geographical location, in Russia it works very poorly, in Sweden, on the contrary, some kind of drive in work, in Thailand, although I want to work, but do not forget about rest.
4) Availability and quality of the Internet.
5) Mood
6) Day of the week, weekend or weekday.
7) The amount of alcohol in the blood, it is pleasant to work at lunch with a steak and a bottle of wine, or stick to the night with a good beer, or it does not work at all under cocktails in the strip bar.
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The first method

The most simple and correct, all tasks are divided into subtasks with a deadline of less than a day, all subtasks are set to the day of commencement (it is also the day of performance). All sorts of task managers are very useful here, at the moment I am working in 5 managers. For myself I use planfix and miniplan, at clients I sit in trello, asana, basecamp. If you are a sane and adequate person and you will do everything on it, then you will have your projects delivered on time and everything will be fine.

Second technique

It differs from the first one and is used by me when I'm too lazy to break everything into subtasks and stuff. I just sit down and start doing the project. A simple example of an ad site for a major customer is something like this.
1) It is necessary to select cms I take oxy classifieds (5-10 min).
2) I deploy a linux instance (15 minutes).
3) I go to freelance to order a quick and simple design (15 minutes of my time and in the evening there will be a simple design).
4) I see that there are no ads, I go to the freelance ordering a parser of ads with autoposting (I spend 30 minutes and in two days I will have a working parser with the compiler, and then the real users will catch up).
5) Something the customer said there about seo, I look at the plugins in cms about seo, I set up the CNC, title and other seo things (1 hour).
6) Seo2 needs Google to find out about us, I go to order freelance for 100 rubles to collect URLs + keywords from the site (15 minutes of my time, the result is in the form of a table url -> keyword in an hour or two).
7) I order from the driver to make me a thousand other links on my table in the internet (hour).
8) I test nominally security and prepare documentation for the customer (2 hours).
9) I do a stress test (1-2 hours).
10) I came up with the design (everything was put together) and put it on the site (about 15-30 minutes).
11) Parser arrived, I install and test (1-5 hours).
12) I hire someone thread on freelance, so he wrote a good letter for the list (15 minutes).
13) I do a newsletter for 100,000 people that we have a website (30 minutes).
I send the result and documentation to the customer.
All this can happen in one day or three. The technique is good when the project is already behind the deadline or is already close to it, just its description, stupidly sit down and do (I apologize for the word stupid).

The third method

The method of proactive release time. It is used when the second does not work. That is, there is a task in which the deadline, the customer calls Skype 50 times, but you didn’t start it, there is plenty of alcohol in the blood, a day off, a beautiful girl on the bed is just a very boring and not interesting task, and other factors do not allow second technique. Then I sharply start doing other tasks. The next day comes and you understand that you have no tasks other than this one and you start doing the overdue task from nothing to do. This technique very much allows not to fail projects.

Fourth method

There comes a moment when it is full of energy, but it does not at all want to be engaged in current tasks. At such moments, the main thing is not to drain your motivation and energy into the trash. These days I usually write articles to my blog or to Habra, these days I try to do small projects just for fun. You come to freelance to hire a programmer for 500 rubles and voila you get some sort of small short-lived project. This week I took the first attempt to take a programmer from habrahabr.ru/qa/25775 . Hopefully we will be writing about something in which I am promoting this week.

Fifth method

When my hands fell completely. This happens with all the visible reasons for this I do not see except the biocycles. On such days, one should not work, but simply stick in passive recreation, watch a movie, play Diablo 2 with old friends, watch anime all day, buy fresh gynes keg, just spit in the stream all day, and other options for passive recreation. The next day you will be pacified and eager for action. If we neglect this technique, then such a state can be delayed for several days or even weeks.

Freelancer, how do you work? Tell us about your experiences in the comments.