As a freelance photographer who’ve made a career out of doing photography professionally, you tend to wear many hats. There are times you may end up so busy that you don’t even remember if you had lunch or even what day it is. I have personally experienced this many times where I’ve found myself confused and ended double booking a shoot or even show late to some of my photography sessions. There often so much to keep up with such as marketing to clients, staying in the loop on social media and also running your own photography business. With all of these hats comes the demand to have some form of order so that you can execute each role correctly and not lose track of what it is you’re doing. In today’s article, we will be exploring some key points as to how freelance photographers can effectively manage their time. Some of these tips have worked for me in the past and still currently work pretty well for me so I can only hope it does the same for you.
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A mistake that is generally made by photographers is that we find ourselves trying to get too much done in one day. While this method may sometimes work out in your favor, there is no guarantee it always will. One of the first solutions I found is to set a number of goals or priorities to achieve on each day. This tip is subjective to what it is you need to get done on each day but nonetheless the objective is the same. What we are doing is giving ourselves a strict to-do list for each day of the week. Of course, you know on some days you will be doing studio or outdoor sessions and on other days you will be staying in to do some editing. Regardless of what the nature of your business is, you can still apply this rule. It is often hard to determine how long our daily tasks will take us even if we have them scheduled for a certain time. Things happen and times tend to slip away from us a little bit so setting priorities in an order of importance will help to prevent this from happening.
Once you’ve started this habit, it becomes easier to adjust and tweak the method as you go. As time passes, new habits or events will emerge that will help to refine your time management strategy.
As you begin your new methods of time management, it is important to track your time as you complete each task in your day today. Tracking your time helps to give you an understanding or rough estimation as to how long certain tasks will take. After tracking your time you will notice certain things that are important and things that lack importance. You will begin to prioritize your time better by allocating it to the things that need it and ignoring the things that don’t.
With technology becoming so advanced, it actually becomes a lot easier to keep a track of important events or meetings. I’ve made it a habit of using the calendar on my mobile phone or laptop. To be more specific, I use my Google calendar as it helps to keep notified as to when an event is coming up and where I need to be. If I’m not around my laptop then a notification is sent to my phone along with an email. This has worked perfectly for me in the past as I’ve forgotten many times about events I was actually booked for.
You can also add different notes to events in your calendar to remind of you anything specific you may need or anything of importance you may need to do. Investing time into scheduling things with your Google Calendar will work wonders and save you a bunch of time in having to worry if you forgot about anything.
In many conversations and debate, the skill of multi-tasking has been praised and deemed beneficial. However, contrary to popular belief, this is not so. When multi-tasking you are not focusing on one thing at a time but rather 2 or more different things. This then means your attention and focus is split into different avenues as well which then leads to you not committing yourself to the quality of each thing you’re doing. Trying to multi-task can be very detrimental to your productivity and by extension even the quality of whatever it is you’re doing.
Overloading yourself with several tasks at one time will put stress on your brain and ultimately stress you out in the long run. You will begin to feel overwhelmed and as if your plate is full with tasks to complete and not enough time to complete them.
Focus on one thing at a time and don’t fall victim to the hype of multi-tasking. With the proper allocation of your time and scheduling of tasks for each day, you will not need to do this.
Thank you for stopping by, I’m happy to have shared these useful tips with you and look forward to doing it again. Take care.
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