How to stop self-employed procrastination hurting your career
Time management and productivity are essential for almost any self-employed business to succeed. But even experienced freelancers and contractors can find themselves putting off tasks for various reasons, so it’s important to understand how to stop self-employed procrastination hurting your career.
Tackling self-employed procrastination due to self-doubt
There are a variety of ways to earn and establish a level confidence in your abilities which allows you to deliver your best work in the available time, rather than missing deadlines striving for perfection.
As a specialist in your field, the temptation will be to compare every piece of work you produce with the best you’ve seen. But this won’t be the case for your client, especially if your experience, budgets and available resources aren’t on the same level as your inspiration.
Your client may have much different expectations. And the earlier you can start sharing drafts, proposals or finished work, the sooner you can achieve them. Remember that a subdued response, or perceived negative comments can have a bigger impact on you emotionally than compliments, so it’s important to separate your personal worth and feelings from your work.
Socialising with other freelancers, or finding an accountability partner, can also boost your self-belief, as it will demonstrate how many other successful self-employed professionals have overcome the same issues. And they can provide encouragement, or a friendly prompt to get started rather than procrastinating.
If someone agrees to mentor you, or keep you accountable for progress, it can help to set yourself a punishment for missing agreed milestones. By setting these yourself, it adds an additional incentive, and avoids forcing someone else into chastising you for any slip-ups.
And make sure you record your previous successes. Good reviews and testimonials aren’t just important for your CV or professional website. They’re also a good reminder of your skills and abilities, especially if you’re prone to self-doubt.
- Focus on delivery a high quality of work to meet the expectations of your client. Not striving for perfection at the expense of deadlines.
- Socialising with other self-employed professionals will demonstrate how common these challenges are. And you can find good advice, accountability partners, or just an outlet to share your concerns.
- Record your previous successes and run through them to keep self-doubt and imposter syndrome under control.
Stop bad clients and briefs contributing to procrastination
Most successful self-employed professionals become increasingly discerning about which clients and projects they’ll take on. And more effective in setting appropriate timelines and resources for delivery, based on previous experience.
Bad clients and unhelpful briefs can contribute to a whole range of issues for freelancers and contractors. But it’s important to understand how you might contribute to your own problems by overpromising, and then underdelivering. Especially if you have a recurring problem with procrastination and missed deadlines.
Investing a little time in setting out a client onboarding process can help ensure that you have all the information required to deliver the work. And help you identify if a client might pose a particular problem.
You can then set out a realistic timeline for work, allowing for any research and learning, feedback and revisions, and a little leeway for any unexpected holds-up such as illness, injury or other life events.
Having a solid brief and contract in place also means you can define working hours, what happens in the event of any delays, and prevent additional work requests being added on without a change to the timescales or financial reward.
If you’re uncertain about the skills required for a certain element of the project, then it’s best to be honest from the start. It’s important to learn and stretch yourself throughout your career, but if you think it might be a leap too far, then collaborating or referring those tasks to other freelancers will be far more beneficial than putting them off before admitting failure.
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