The secret of being truly organised
Get your workflow management system right!
Being a freelancer is not as “free” as one might think, something I’ve come to realise more and more in the past few months. Indeed, it requires a great deal of self-discipline and organisation, which is a word so often used that has basically lost its meaning. What do we mean when we say “Oh, I’m a very organised person”- That your desk looks pristine? That your wardrobe is organised by type of clothes, then season, then colour? That you know how to juggle different projects at the same time?
-This might be "organisation", but not the kind you need in our industry-
During the past year I’ve had the opportunity to develop my business and meet many colleagues from virtually all over the world, sharing best practices not only when it comes to translating and interpreting, but also about how to set up your own workflow management system. With this fancy name I’m referring to the array of measures you have put in place in order to keep track of your projects, your invoicing system and business-related errands. If we consider this, being organised means having a workflow management system based on your type of business, which is efficient and effective: this has to be personalised, meaning on the one hand that it has to respond to the necessities, requirements and type of your business and, on the other, it needs to reflect your personality and way of thinking. I’ll return to this point later on.
Even though the system is largely based on your business and on yourself, there are two rules you need to apply for it to work:
The law of simplicity. This is something I learnt during my scientific studies: when scientists were trying to explain how the universe worked they were coming up with ever more complicated models, drawing planets with orbits that were based on other planet’s orbits, that in turn were dependent on other planet’s orbits. The theories reached a ridiculous point, with a hypothetical universe that was neither efficient nor effective.
-Complicated much?- This is when Occam's razor came in handy to clean up the whole mess. This philosophical and now scientific principle says: “Plurality is not to be posited without necessity”, aka do not make things overly complicated when there is a perfectly logical simpler explanation or solution available. Learn from the enlightened great minds of science and design a system that’s easy to understand, implement and then manage on a daily basis.
Eliminate the possibility of error. Possibly the one thing that stuck with me from the entire economics module at university, this was a personal suggestion of my professor describing the perfect business management model: if you want it to work, you must eliminate the possibility of making mistakes at the source. The system needs to be unambiguous, precise and straightforward.
These two principles have overlapping elements, but I think they underline slightly different aspects you need in your management system: it needs to be simple, with the minimum number of elements possible, and clear, so you cannot misinterpret it. Ideally speaking, you should be able to show it to, say, your grandparents, and they should use it with no problems. It’s ambitious, I know, but this is the theory.
I’ve mentioned that the system should also be based on the type of person you are: have you fully embraced technology? Are you an ink-on-paper type of guy? Are you always on the go or do you live chained to your desk with your cat and cuppa? These are all elements that can show you what to look for in your management system. If you’re an interpreter and translator odds are you’ll be on the go most days and you need a tool that allows you to have access whenever and whenever to your system. If you’re a translator, this doesn’t really bother you. In both cases, you might want to keep a paper copy of part of the system, like a weekly diary.
There are plenty of tools that allow you to do different things in different ways, depending on your needs. Off the top of my head, I can mention good ol’Excel and Google Drive, or some task-managing software as Meistertask and Airtable. Each has got its unique features that are helpful for keeping track of different variables: I like to have my projects displayed nicely in chronological order of assignment, the relative client, their deadline, the hour or word count, the deadline, the final amount, the invoice (the actual file!) and its due date. The tool I use has got a pretty awesome function which automatically adds up the numerical values you insert in a pre-set column, so at the bottom of the page I get my monthly word count, editing hours, interpreting hours and, wait for it -
projected income for the month. I can actually filter out each client and see who is the most profitable one. But this is just a sneak peak of all the things you can do and customise if you know your way around, I will be speaking in more detail about this in a separate post, so stay tuned!
One final point that I think it is important to mention is that your workflow management system needs to be integrated in your day-to-day life: you have to stay on top of it, keeping it up to date with the progress of your work. Some parts may need daily “maintenance”, others just once a week, or even once a month, but you need to recognise when the best time to do it is: at the beginning or end of a working day, on the weekend or on the first Monday after the first full moon before the summer solstice. I, for example, need to sit down for a couple of hours on a Saturday or Sunday to review the online version of my system and prepare a paper one in my diary. On a daily basis, I need to update my project schedule at least once at the end of the day so I know what I need to do the day after and I can jump right in. In some cases, if I receive a new project during the morning, I re-work my schedule during lunch break.
I think the fundamental things to take away from this post are just a few, but very difficult to implement in practice: to be truly organised you need to design a system that allows you to control your business activity, which at the same time takes into consideration all the elements of your activity (type of projects, type of clients, invoicing, book and document-keeping), together with elements of your personality. The system must be implemented in its easiest form possible, both from a structural and operational point of view. Once you’ve analysed all of these points and found your needs, you can start to shop around for the perfect tool to make it come true, which we’ll discuss together pretty soon.
