5 Tips to Manage Your Time as a Remote Worker

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If you’re a remote worker, it’s important to find ways to manage your time. Good time management can help you meet your goals, stay productive and maintain a healthy work/life balance.

Whether you work from home or you’re a freelancer, you need to find ways to organise your time – and these ways should work for you and your job.

5 tips to manage your time as a remote worker

There are a few key ways to manage your time as a remote worker, including:

1. Create a routine for yourself
2. Take regular breaks
3. Prioritise your tasks
4. Remove (or reduce) distractions
5. Be realistic!

Let’s take a closer look at how to manage your time…

1. Create a routine for yourself

If you work in a traditional job, your routine may be set by your boss or you may need to decide how you’ll fit your work into your allotted time.

However, if you’re a freelancer, you’ll need to set your own routine – and I really recommend creating a routine for yourself. Giving yourself structure is central to success and stability as a freelancer.

Whether you’re a translator or content writer, creating an effective routine can help you manage your time. You’re less likely to get distracted and you’ll understand what you should be doing to meet your targets.

2. Take regular breaks

It might sound counter-productive, but if you want to manage your time as a remote worker, you need to take regular breaks from your desk. Taking time to rest, hydrate, get a snack or go for a walk can help you stay focused on your job.

If you’re a remote worker, you’ll spend a lot of time at home. Treat yourself to regular breaks to give your brain a rest when you need it.

Getting up from your desk every time you finish a task can also help you break up your work, effectively managing your time throughout the day.

3. Prioritise your tasks

Time management is all about thinking about the time you have – and how you can best use it. For many people, deadlines will be the driving force behind prioritising tasks.

If you’re a freelancer, you don’t have a boss pressuring you to reach a deadline. That’s you – and it’s a good and a bad thing. You need to motivate yourself and make your time work for you so that you’re always sending off your work on time.

You also need to think about how your tasks fit into the rest of your week or month. It’s important to plan ahead, looking not just at what you need to do today but how your work today will impact the rest of your week.

If you don’t work on Friday, how can you fit your tasks into 4 days? If you work part-time, how can you make the most of your time to get everything done?

4. Remove (or reduce) distractions

Distractions are a part of working from home. Although you can still get distracted when you work in an office, remote work brings unique obstacles. It’s easier to scroll on your phone, pop on the TV or do housework.

However, it’s important to remove or reduce distractions if you want to improve your time management skills as a freelancer. Put your phone away and remove any temptations from your workspace (within reason).

I find it helpful to allocate “distraction time”. I can go on my phone, watch TV or do some housework – but once that time is over, I have to focus on my work again.

For more tips, check out my post about how to avoid pesky work-from-home distractions!

5. Be realistic

You need to be realistic about what you can achieve with your time. Time management is all about effectively managing the time you have – not giving yourself an impossible list of tasks to fit in that time.

Use past experience to work out how long it’ll take for you to complete a task or project – and give yourself a reasonable amount of time to do it.

Allotting the right amount of time for each task is particularly important if you’re a freelancer. You set your own routine, your own work times and your own deadlines – so you need to understand how long something will take you to finish.

Do you have any time management tips for remote workers? How do you manage your time? Do you follow a strict work routine?

Tell me all your thoughts in the comments 🙂

Happy reading x