Should Freelancers Use A To-Do List?

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 17th December 2018.

Are you a believer in having a To-Do List and using it daily? This is an important question because it can give you focus on being productive.

For me, there is nothing like being able to cross something off my To-Do List at the end of the day. t gives me a sense of accomplishment of having achieved something for the day.

There is the trap of putting things on your To-Do List that are meaningless and do not accomplish anything e.g. thinning out your filing cabinet after the end of the financial year.

These tasks have to be done, but they are not really accomplishing something that is productive and will add to your achieving your income goal.

When I was starting out freelancing I did not use a To-Do List because I believed that I could keep in my mind what I wanted to achieve for the day.

It took me about a year to find out that this was a mistake. Here is a quote that goes to the essence of the importance of a To-Do List:

“Checking items off a to-do list don’t determine progress; focusing on your priorities is what counts.”

―Frank Sonnenberg, BookSmart: Hundreds of real-world lessons for success and happiness

Kirsty Stuart of Freelance Writers Online has written an article called Do You Need A To-Do List? You can read Kirsty’s article here.

Motivate Yourself!

“The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will
learn from more than what you tell them. They don’t
remember what you try to teach them. They remember what
you are.”

– Jim Henson

Have You Read: Preparing For The Workforce Of The Fourth Industrial Revolution?

Would you ever feel motivated to read about the future of work and how it will impact your life?

As freelancers, we are going to be impacted more than the 9 to 5 employees by the changes coming to the future of work.This is because technology is empowering us to enhance our skills and improve our productivity.

To keep abreast of changes that are going to impact us and our work-life balance should be the motivation to read what futurists are saying about our lives.

Each year world leaders meet in Davos in Switzerland to think about the future and discuss ideas that are:

“committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”.

It does seem far above the mundane life of freelancing and managing your gigs to achieve your income goal. But wait, they are talking about our future, look at these headings from The Future of Jobs report:

Chapter 1:

The Future of Jobs and Skills;
Drivers of Change;
Employment Trends;
Skills Stability;
Future Workforce Strategy;

Chapter 2:

The Industry Gender Gap;
The Business Case for Change;
Gaps in the Female Talent Pipeline;
Barriers to Change;
Women and Work in the Fourth Industrial Revolution;
Approaches to Leveraging Female Talent.

It is important to be motivated and concerned about your future because it concerns your freelancing strategy and skills development.

Here is a link to The World Economic Forum report on The Future of Jobs. Click here. It is a good topic for your next freelancing group meeting.

Jared Lindzon has written an article for Fast Company about this topic called The Top 10 industries for freelancers.You can read it by clicking here.

Productivity Tip Of The Week

What Are The Stories That Inspire You?

Stories can be very powerful. They can inspire you and make you more productive. If you are a freelancer you will know that starting out can be very daunting when you are on your own and competing in a global marketplace.

I don’t know whether you have seen the YouTube video of J.K. Rowling’s story. In case you have not here it is here.

When you are considering whether you are being productive or not, especially when you feel like giving up because your results have been meagre, it is a good idea to view a video like the one produced by J.K.Rowlings. It is also good to review her inspirational quotes:

I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed.
Never! What’s to be ashamed of? I went through a really rough
time and I am quite proud that I got out of that.

J.K.Rowlings

Sophie Gibson has written Success stories of female freelancers for the IPSE magazine and you can read it here.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

As A Freelancer Have You Ever Felt Depressed?

It seems strange that some famous creative people suffer from depression. It appears to be a source of their work life balance that produces a creative drive.

This drive enables them to struggle to overcome depression through creativity.JK Rowlings is one that we have mentioned in the previous segment.

However, she is not alone in that struggle in work-life balance to be productive. Here are nine great creative writers who also triumphed; you can read about them here.

Anya Kamenetz wrote the article Why Freelancers Are So Depressed for Fast Company where she made this statement:

Job satisfaction or dissatisfaction has been shown for decades
to have a strong impact on mental and physical health.

This is a common theme with freelancers that work in the gig economy. In Anya’s article, she talks about how Sara Horowitz sets out to help freelancers who are working alone.

Sara established the Freelancers Union to help unaffiliated workers. You can read Anya’s article here.

Financial Tip of the Week

Do You Have A Business Plan For Your Freelancing Business?

Freelancing is a business, right? Businesses are normally created to make money and if you have a business plan you are more likely to make money.

It seems pretty simple, but in reality, a lot of people don’t do it. When I was a financial planner working with accountants it was often said of small and medium businesses without a business plan: “Fail to plan, you plan to fail!”.

It seems very simple, but it is true. Sarah Peterson has written an article for the Freelancers Union Blog entitled How to create a simple two page business plan.

You can read Sarah’s article by clicking here. Sarah has a link to a free two page business plan within her article.

To be sure that you have another view of the steps in writing your business plan we have located another article from the Freelancer.com Community written by Nicole Walters it is entitled Here’s How You Write The Perfect Business Plan and you can read it by clicking here.

Drought News

The www.abc.net.au is keeping a full coverage of the drought crisis in Eastern Australia and you can read about it here. You can learn how you can help the farmers here .

I will maintain the links for my opinion of the New Economy and that skills and job focused training is one of the possible solutions for long term structural assistance to rural communities.

This article sets out the reasons: Training choices matter for freelancers and career changers. You can read it by clicking on the link.

There are now 5,000 skills in 90 categories that the digital economy can offer according to Upwork’s 2nd Quarter Skills Index for 2018, see ~~here~~.

Articles now on our website that are relevant are listed here:

There will be more over the coming months.

Amazon News

If you are like me you will have become aware that Amazon’s Alexa is starting to make inroads into our everyday lives.

I have a bank account with NAB and they have started operating an interface with the bank where you can ask Alexa about their services and your account details. You can read about it here.

The weekly AWS news video link to acloud.guru is here. They are the leading trainers globally for AWS freelancers.

Amazon Associates Website Case Study

The latest article on www.bestsellershourly.com Amazon Case Study website is entitled Winter clothing shopping with Amazon Wardrobe – 15 top reasons to use the service which you can read here.

The interesting part about this article is that it is aimed at the northern hemisphere winter market under Amazon One Link which you can read about here.

Freelancers And Cyber Security

Pinterest: In view of the recent hack of Reddit we have decided to link to the Australian Bankers Association fact sheet entitled Small Business – Protecting Your Business Information Online which you can access here. We urge you look at other Fact Sheets that are available from the Association as well related to business and personal security.

We have gained approval from Robert Siciliano to bring you extracts from his books related to cyber security for freelancers. Robert Siciliano is an identity theft expert and consultant.

He also gives self defense and personal safety seminars. Robert provides safety and identity theft fraud prevention tips and advice on multimedia channels in the United States. We have his approval to bring you weekly extracts from his books: