My first time working full-time in a newsroom, my team would meet at least once a week to discuss our company goals and progress. While setting goals as a freelancer might be a little different, it’s equally as important.
Why? Because goals help you grow. Without setting goals, your job will become stagnant and boring. Goals allows you to challenge yourself, improve and consistently feel gratified in your work. They help you to measure your success in more ways than just monetarily. Here are a few ways to help you decide on what goals you should set for yourself:
1. Create a timeline for your work
Where do you want to be in a year? Five years? Ten? Try to cover all aspects of your life, not just work – after all, isn’t the point of freelancing to create a better work/life balance? Plan out what you would like your life to be like, and set goals throughout that timeline to help get you there.
2. Measure urgency vs. impact
The idealized concept of freelancing is that you get to be your own boss, right? What many beginning freelancers don’t understand is that your day is still greatly measured by other people – clients. Because we as freelancers work according to the deadlines our clients set for us,we often get stuck working solely on projects that are most urgent. When we do this, we neglect the projects that are more impactful for our career but don’t have a specified deadline.
Take a step back from time to time and ask yourself what’s most important for your business and its growth.
3. Be SMART
Use the SMART acronym to measure your goals: Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. Setting a goal like “get more clients,” is not SMART. Instead, change that goal to “increase my clientele by 20 percent by June 2018.”
4. Set short-term goals
Set goals for yourself that you can meet on a daily or weekly basis. These simpler goals will help you to reach your long-term goals, and they’ll help you to recognize your progress on a smaller scale. Often times, larger goals can seem daunting and unattainable, causing you to become discouraged.
When you give reward yourself for achieving the smaller steps, those big goals you set for yourself won’t seem so frightening.
5. Set goals you can achieve yourself
Make sure all the goals you set are ones that are within your own control. Don’t just make plans for your freelancing business and hope the universe hands it all to you. Instead of making goals like “have a steady base income of $2,500 monthly,” develop goals and habits that will help you achieve that. For example, make it a goal to contact 50 potential clients by a certain deadline.
It’s perfectly fine to set goals like the monthly income I mentioned above, as long as you have “SMART” goals that help you reach that.
When you work as a freelancer, it can be easy to get caught in the moment. Your mentality can end up being nothing more than project to project – and this mindset will make you a pretty stagnant freelancer. Setting goals with these tips in mind will help you further your career and give you more job satisfaction in the years to come.
by: Emily Brady
Emily Brady is a content writer for AFEUSA. Her education in Communication Sciences with an emphasis in journalism from Brigham Young University makes her a great fit for AFEUSA. Emily enjoys writing and often works as a freelance writer in her free time.
