CORPORATE SUFI: What to do when the boss is you

It is the age of the independent worker.

And while the obvious perks of being your own boss are multiple, the challenges, too, are equally baffling.

Instead of one boss, you now have multiple clients to report to, schedules to adhere with and responsibilities to handle.

With freelancing on the rise, the need to self-learn, instruct and discipline is a critical to create a successful and profitable enterprise and achieve personal success.

Here are a few tips to start strong in this field:

1. Set your goals and read them every day – Find out what inspires you, moves you, makes you passionate enough to give it your all.

That is you life purpose. And ideally the work or profession you choose should be driven around this purpose. Once you are clear about your purpose, you should set your life and work goals around this purpose.

Then break these goals into yearly, six monthly, monthly and weekly sub-goals. They are the stepping stones to your success. Hence know them well. Read these goals everyday and tweak whenever necessary.

These goals will help you to remain inspired, energized and on track, enhancing your daily progress in a significant manner.

2. Planning – Planning time cuts down execution time and avoids duplication of effort as well as gets the most important work done first. Identify your most productive times, and then set them as distraction-free work time zones.

Commit your most important tasks or work to those zones, and whether you feel like it or not, do not deviate. This will help you to structure your workday and enhance self-discipline to generate maximum productivity.

3. Set your working hour limit - As a freelancer it is easy to lull yourself to working in a scattered manner with diffused work hours, stretching all across the day and over weekends. Decide on your daily number of work hours and shut your activity when the required hours are done.

This will force you to be mindful and productive during the designated hours.  

4. Keep your skills updated – Keep an eye on what’s happening in your industry by subscribing to relevant sites, networking with similar professionals and analyzing changing customer requirements.

Find out what new skills are most relevant and aligned with your work portfolio and upgrade whenever required. Another way to keep evolving personal target to keep getting more efficient and productive at what you do.

5. Get out of your comfort zone – Allocate a certain percent of your time to trying out new and challenging projects.

Set harder deadlines, try out new combinations, take on something you have never done before, improvise existing activities. Unless you stick your head out, you will not be able to expand your capability zone.

6. Stay healthy and active – Though it’s very tempting to lounge in front of your computer under the pretext of work, it’s important to allocate a certain time everyday to physical exercise. Exercise not only helps you to remain healthy but also aids the release of hormones, which help the growth of new blood vessels in the brain, improve mood and sleep, and reduce stress and anxiety.

Exercise is vital to maintaining a healthy and active mind and in effect a purposeful stance in the way you approach life and work.

7. Be open to feedback – Your work might not suit everyone’s needs or it might require changes to align itself with client expectations.

Hence, don’t take rejection or criticism personally. View it as information and insight, using it objectively to work on your shortcomings and hone your skills.

This article is part of the A to Z Corporate Sufi series