Working as an independent consultant for 25 years has definitely improved my focus on working productively. I think it was after the first month of working without any supervision, that I realized that I couldn’t just do whatever I wanted and delay my actual billable work off to future me without any consequences.

If I wanted to be paid, I needed to be able to complete work I said I would do and show my results to customers.

This may seem obvious, but when your present self thinks your future self should be doing that, and then your present self reaches the end of the month realizing it didn’t allow your future self to do those things, you then have a problem.

So I learned that I had to be more self controlled and actually work on things rather than play video games and work on pet projects no one else was interested in paying me for.

Being self disciplined in this means I really look at the time it takes me to write these articles vs the time I can actually work on billable projects. The plain truth is that I need to make sure I work enough billable hours to make a living. Sometimes this is a hard truth. There are certain things I’d like to work on that I think can help people, but I need to pace that carefully if it doesn’t produce revenue. When revenue is down, it’s time to spend less time on the non-billable helpful tasks and focus on the billable helpful tasks. I try to make sure that I don’t participate in any tasks that are either not billable or not helpful for myself or others. I try to make sure that I don’t even do any billable tasks if they are not beneficial for anyone.

This leads me to 2 important principles / methods of working.

1. Finding out what is important to my customers so that I am not trying to bill for busy-work. I want everything I deliver to be of use. And to find this out, I use the Why Conversation defined by Jonathan Stark.
2. Take the lead from the seven seconds web site guy Kevin: How to work less and use the Pomodoro technique

Figuring out what to do, and limiting your time to focus on doing it!