As the title says, how do you manage your time between Projects? and how do you keep a life work balance? Any advice is appreciated!
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Top comments (15)
Can you provide a little more context on the kind of environment you are working in?
The answer to this question depends a bit on whether you're choosing what to work on and when vs. being assigned work by someone else.
It also depends on whether your weekly time commitments are fixed or flexible.
I am a freelancer! So I am my own boss, I usually work for 70 hours/week
I recommend over the next year trying to double your rates and cut that time commitment in half, it's not sustainable.
Use as much time as possible between projects to improve skills and build relationships with current and prospective clients, and then little by little replace lower paying engagements with higher paying engagements.
As your profitability increases, start reducing your overall time commitment, and also start increasing the percentage of non-billable time you have available in each work week. Having your billable hours represent no more that 70% of your weekly time commitment is a decent target to shoot for.
Then use the non-billable time to once again, improve your skills, connect with current and prospective and future clients, build out whatever tooling you need to support your own work etc. Once you have time built into your schedule like this you should be able to create a fairly even flow of work, so that you aren't either overwhelmed or in a holding pattern all the time.
It's a bit cheesy in places, but the book Focal Point by Brian Tracy may be relevant and useful to you.
Woow! Great advice! Thank you so much! I will make Sure to apply this! Will also check the book
Working on multiple projects while still having time for yourself can be hard! and if not done right, it can lead you to burn-out!
Every week I set the tasks that I need to get done for each project/responsibility. I keep track of those tasks by using Jira or Trello, depending on the project needs. I plan my tasks for each day the night before so I know what I need to do when I wake up.
How do you currently keep track of your tasks?
What are you struggling with the most?
I would say putting a priority on my tasks :( because I have too many things to do in the day that I just freeze, I hope I make sense :O
I made a list of "things I would like to do" (things like: movies, series, books, read news, learn things) and ordered them according to their priority. So, when I finish the things I have to do yes or yes (like studying or working), I watch a movie (I have a list of movies, series, books, etc.), for example, and I go to watch a movie every day Until I finish it. Then, I will start my list of series or books.
That's perfect! What about when you have too many things to do? Do you limit your list to specific number of items each day?
Yes. Sometimes I can't watch a movie because I have to study or I have to meet with my relatives or other people.
Makes sense!
I generally like to try and time box activities. So if I'm in work, I'm in work through my core hours. If I've something that really needs done I will but otherwise it can wait. I also find that working extreme hours can be a result of a poor estimation process. Maybe you need to check the work you are committing to and provide more realistic expectations for when it should be complete?
Yeah that's true! I admit that I am not that good in providing expectations, plus the long hours I work on aren't really that much when it comes to focus (I tend to get distracted a lot) , I totally get what you mean
If you get distracted a lot you can download chrome/firefox extensions to block your browsing of sites between times.
Estimation and managing expectations takes time and experience! When you realize you're spending too long in work this is one of the ways you may be able to get some time back. Start by taking a look at work previously delivered and compare your estimation to how long it actually took you to complete
Wow that's really helpful! I actually got a few extensions now on Chrome that does help a lot, like blocking social networks and other websites :D but I will for sure compare my last work and see how long that really took me!
Technical debt and if there is none learning new stacks