To refine your time management talents you have to start with the very basics of your daily life. These are the

5 Things to Do Every Morning to Improve Your Performance

Boost your energy. I would suppose you did not expect to see an exercise advice in this list. However, you will find that waking up and starting your day actively will help you increase your productivity and performance. Instead of having a lazy morning, try and give your body 10-20 minutes to wake up by making some stretching, yoga or other exercises that will make the blood rush to your brain and muscles.

Do not skip breakfast. I know this is hard to many people since they wake up, drink a cup-a-coffee as quickly as possible, and rush to the workplace eating a fast snack or nothing at all. This is stressful for your body, drains you out of energy and effectively decreases your productivity, focus and even ruins your mood. Once you are done with some active body stretching, give yourself a nourishing and easy to digest breakfast. You will feel calmer, energized, and more focused.

Prioritize. Always start your work day with the difficult and most important tasks. Give yourself the time to think them through and plan, creating the best solution to quickly take them off your to-do list with flying colors. Why the hardest first?  Because you will be fully awake, you will have more energy and, therefore, be more focused and productive. Yes, focus and productivity are critical for your time management abilities.

Start timing yourself from the morning. Timing our work is an essential part of attaining best time management skills. If we wish to optimize how we use our time we must know how much time we apply for everything we do, when is our activity high and when are we hitting the lows. That is why timing yourself will help you clearly see what makes you struggle and how to fix that. Time tracking and productivity are essential for the development of our individual skills.

Consult and communicate. Consulting and clarifying what has to be done during the day in the morning is also significant. This will save you the trouble of repeating and redoing. Avoiding unnecessary time lost is essential. By coordinating with your coworkers, subordinates and employees you will increase the overall productivity and decrease the mistakes that result from miscommunication.

Increasing your day-to-day productivity is possible if you start timing yourself and communicating. But as noted above, utilizing and taking care of your bodily energy is also important. Do not skip a day to tend to your health. You cannot be successful for long if you neglect basic needs like these.

That being said, it is known that UpWork‘s useful tool for both freelancers and their clients was exactly the opportunity to track the working hours as evidence for the payment required.

For freelancers, it will be extremely easy to substitute the freelance website UpWork‘s app with SCREENish‘ time tracking software. Why?

UpWork‘s time tracking software allowed the freelancers to pick an employer, a project and start tracking their hours, with the app taking screenshots every now and then, also recording their keyboard/mouse activity, storing all info on their website in a work diary menu.

The Software

As an employee/freelancer with SCREENish, you can again choose between multiple employers and projects in the highly intuitive time tracking app.

SCREENish is also an app that allows time tracking with screenshots and records the activity levels of your mouse/keyboards.

With SCREENish, you can set notes for each working cycle as the time tracking app will remind you to update your information, as often as you have set it to, while you work on your project.

The Worklog

The information recorded from the time tracking software is simultaneously uploaded the in the SCREENish database, accessible only to the freelancer and the employer.

Using the worklog menu on the website of SCREENish you can access your tracked activities.

SCREENish holds a record of your working hours, where it allows the freelancer to edit them, also see how much hours have they worked on which project, monthly, weekly and daily.

The Employers

Furthermore, the employer can set hourly rates and weekly limits for each hired freelancer.

The employer can create projects, add their objective and form teams, using the project panel.

The website also offers an accounting option, which summarizes the working hours of the chosen employee for selected time period and calculates the payment based on the hourly rates and recorded time in the timesheets.

SCREENish also presents the employer with a weekly graph, where the overall performance of the team is presented.

The Advantage

A huge plus is, SCREENish time tracking software is free for use for freelancers, while there is a small monthly fee for employers and the more people an employer has the better price we can offer.

You can check SCREENish‘ full options in here.

Our team is constantly improving the services of the app and website to make it even more convenient than it already is. Why don’t you try SCREENish? You get a 10 free trial, no credit card info required! If you have any questions, use the contact form and we will provide you with an answer shortly.

Regards,
SCREENish Team.

The Newest UpWork Pricing Policy Update

Now, just a little while after the first announcement, UpWork sent a new message to its users, promising their policy will not take effect over the old contracts, only new ones. Furthermore, the day of change has been postponed to 21st of June. Now, according to the last letter, a freelancers fee will not change for old contracts, only for those signed after June 21st, however, if the old contract reaches the $500 the fee will be according to the new policy. At first look, it seems okay, but question is, how many lifelong contracts are there on the website?

Sooner or later the contract will be over, the job will be done and freelancers will again pay 25% in UpWork taxes. Lucky will only be a few people with contracts above $10,000 and not forever. Clients’ new pricing has not changed and they will continue to pay 2.75% per-transaction fee unless they are from a specific country.  This only serves to prove that even with the newest pricing policy update, there are not actual lasting changes that can be beneficial for the freelance community. It simply just delays the inevitable.

The Freelance Community

We could only guess the freelance platform owners got scared of the weave of leavers, who publicly denounced the website. We could point that and the fact that it has been a significant drop in numbers of the job opportunities posted in the UpWork feed, especially the last weeks. After many have accused UpWork of ripping freelancers and employers the internet is now flooded with commercials of upcoming or older websites promising their users a fair system.  Another future solution many have taken into consideration is the usage of a time tracking software to keep record of work hours and continue their relationship with  clients.

The Future Of Freelancing

The newest fee changes of UpWork may be tempting for the old users of the website, yet will repel any new aspiring talents to offer their services using that exact platform. Inevitably it is highly unlikely those who have left to return to the website, as the previous declaration forever branded UpWork as a website who does not care for it users, be it freelancers or employers.

The Conclusion

Once a great platform, which gave amazing opportunities, UpWork is now causing a great deal of changes on the freelance market. The user migration has started and the newest change will not be able to stop that. The monopole over the freelance marker is no longer in the hands of UpWork, unless they yet again decide to make a fee change that cancels the change. Anyhow, the past events have won UpWork a bad name over the internet, and there is no cure for that. It is up to the freelance community to either choose to keep up with the insane pricing or search for better solutions like time tracking software or other freelance platforms.