Freelancing is the model of the future, that much is undeniable. Around 25% of EU workers are freelancers, and the trend continues to grow and grow as time goes on. Deciding your projects, schedules and vacations goes hand in hand with all this.
However, working alone leads to an absence of feedback, which can make rating one’s own growth complicated. Thus, self-review as a freelancer becomes indispensable. In this Befree blog post we teach you how to self-evaluate with a series of tips.
The source of the problem
The day-to-day life of a freelancer focuses on meeting deadlines and determining how best to get the job done. However, setting clear objectives to evaluate growth and goals often gets lost along the way.
And that’s because, unlike full-time employees, freelancers don’t have meetings with their managers or department heads. But goal setting is just as, if not more, important when working individually as it is in a team. Spending time evaluating your short- and long-term goals pays off in the long run.
Here are some important tips to follow in order to make a self-review as a freelancer.
1- Track your income and hours
Many freelancers measure the success of their work in financial terms. After all, it is one of the main goals of every worker. That’s why, when performing a self-assessment, everyone wants to take into account their income and whether it is evolving favorably year after year.
If we follow this path, it is advisable to establish certain parameters. For example, those set by Ilima Loomis, a science and health writer. The Hawaiian native sets annual and quarterly income goals and uses spreadsheets to track her assignments, set her rates and reflect her monthly income. Comprehensive tracking also helps her identify the best-paying clients. This allows him to accept less work from clients who aren’t worth his time so he can take on more projects from higher-paying clients.
“Having it all in one place allows me to have a quick overview of my project portfolio, as well as information on the type of work that is getting me results,” explains the American writer.
2- Track how you’re generating work
As we often say at Befree, work calls for work. But it’s important to know how new projects are coming in to get the most out of them. Rochelle Melander, author and writing coach, has several facets to her business, including coaching, teaching and editing, and she’s also passionate about writing books. Her analyses break down the income from each and provide her with information on how to find the gold mines.
This year, for example, Melander found that most of her new coaching and publishing clients came from her newsletter list. The funny thing is that Rochelle had thought about stopping her newsletter work, but this information revealed to her how crucial it was to her business.
3- Be SMART
Melander is also featured in the third tip about doing a self-review as a freelancer. She is an advocate of the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely, which translates to ‘specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely’) goal approach. In addition to setting these goals, he encourages his coaching clients to dig deeper and ask several questions.
Is your goal connected to your purpose? Are your goals intrinsic or self or extrinsic or external? In general, people work harder and perform better with intrinsic goals than with extrinsic goals. Are there any difficult goals you want to try? Sometimes a difficult goal can help you discover a new skill, talent or area of interest. Do your goals go together or do they conflict? For example, if your goals are to meet 20 potential clients in the next quarter and spend 10 more hours a week on creative writing, are they both doable?
4- Don’t forget the achievement factor
It is clear that professional goals and accomplishments also affect personal life and interests. It is important to weigh financial success with mental health and work-life balance, which is different for everyone.
In this recommendation for making a self-review as a freelancer, we bring back the advice of Hawaii’s Loomis. She recently limited her work hours to 36 billable hours per month after she began to feel overwhelmed by her projects. She now sets aside one day a week to work on creative projects, such as writing children’s books.
So, the maxim we take from this is that sometimes it’s better to put less financially profitable projects ahead of those that bring us more personal fulfillment.
