Considering a career change from a full-time basis to freelancing sooner or later, two concerns occurred to me: how fast I can make my income stable and how to manage my time to maximize efficiency. The former is, I believe, mainly a matter of time, i.e. I will eventually get there so that is not something I have to worry about at this point (even though I worry about it!). The latter is more of a concern as of now.
My freelance work is done at the tip of my fingers on the notebook keyboard, and I easily slip into the world of the fun and interesting Internet. Sitting at the office as a salary employee, I get paid the same money whether I am at my maximum efficiency or not. However, freelancing for me is labor-intensive and the more I focus, the more I make. In this sense, the Internet provides so much to read and my precious time is sometimes wasted on trashy stuff. Especially where my freelance work is done after day work and during weekends, I lack of the absolute time for leisure activities. To manage time and train myself to a freelancer’s life, I started using an online time and project management software, called ‘Intervals’.
‘Intervals’ offers a 30-day trial, as other same-kind software providers do, and the sign-up process was easy as opposed to understanding the system to fit my needs.
A sample page that tracks the time I spent on a task – here a posting.
The system seems easy to learn but I had a little bit of headaches in the beginning while trying to understand how it works and the terminology and customize it to fit me. It’s only the second day, and I’ve roughly learned the basics and am happy so far as the system seems to satisfy my intention. I wanted a software that would tell me exactly how long it took to finish a job. And a posting on my blogs which I am doing for fun and writing exercise! In addition, ‘Intervals’ lets me manage projects and generate invoices.
Now I initiated time management, and hope I would become more productive with the help of this time tracking system. Then, my the other concern – earning stable income- will eventually be gone. Hopefully!!
Hana Lee Blog 