• Home
• Blog
• Portfolio
• Contact

Resolutions – The Importance of Goals when Freelancing

Posted 28 Dec 2009 - No Comments - leave yours now!

2010 is upon us. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, the year 2010 seemed like the distant future and I expected personal jet-packs and silver jumpsuits by then. In fact I imagined that we would all be living in a world similar to the Jetsons, I just hoped that all small boys wouldn’t be as annoying as Elroy!

I’ve never been a great fan of New Year celebrations. I don’t really see all that much to celebrate. It’s just a marker in time, the turning of a calendar. People seem to give the event a lot of undue attention.
Don’t get me wrong, I won’t turn down an opportunity to have a good time. I just see it as a lot of fuss over nothing.

The turn of the year always makes us stop and reflect of the year that has just gone, and more importantly, look forward to the year before us. This is a wonderful thing, but I don’t see why this activity has to be contained to the beginning of January?

As a freelancer, performance analysis and the setting of future goals should be a regular occurrence, not just a whim of the season.
I’m writing this post as an elaboration of a point I mentioned in an earlier article about time management tips where I briefly mentioned the importance of setting goals.

Define your Goals

The first step is to define your targets. I set myself ‘Personal Creativity Goals’ and ‘Business Goals’.

Personal Goals
These targets are all about your own aims for personal advancement. These goals should be all about making yourself a better designer. They don’t have immediate implications to the growth of your business, but over time they will affect what you can achieve and what services you can provide to your clients.

Examples: I reviewed my work over the last few months and concluded that I have predominately been working in Illustrator with vectors, I have begun to stray away from Photoshop.
My goal for the next few months is to initiate personal projects using Photoshop and teach myself new techniques and try to catch up on the developments within the programme that I might have been oblivious to in the recent past.

Another of my personal goals is to give myself more time for writing. Since starting my Blog this year I have been fitting the writing process into my usual routine. I have decided to try and make writing a bigger part of my working week to make my Blog content stronger and find a more distinctive style.

There are a few others as well. The basic idea behind them all is to motivate myself to improve my creative output, to broaden my horizons and open myself up to new creative disciplines. It’s a great way to stop my work from becoming comfortable and stale.

Business Goals
This set of aims focuses on how I conduct my business affairs. They are all about how I want my little company to evolve and grow. The targets are a lot simpler to define and you can easily judge if you have achieved them.

Examples: These are quite simple aims on my part. They usually involve a targeted turnover for a specific period of time, a number of new clients that I would like to attract and work with, even the type of projects I would like to work on.

Ambition

The most important point to consider is your own ambition. There is no point in giving yourself a target that is impossible to achieve, it is in fact counter-productive. It is also silly to set aims that can be reached with consummate ease.
You need to assess your capabilities and set targets that are difficult but achievable. This way, if you reach your goal the event will be accompanied with a sense of achievement and a great motivational kick that will encourage you to strive towards your next set of targets.

I go through this process every few months and find it immensely helpful on many levels. It helps you to gain perspective on the work that you do. We all run the risk of getting lost in a never ending stream of projects.
If you take the time to stop, look back on what you have done and assess what needs to be done next, it can give you that extra impetus to carry on and work towards a preset target.

Resolutions aren’t just for the new year, you should be setting them all year round. If you don’t reach your goals, who cares? It’s those same goals that got you to work as hard as you did, and that’s the whole point.
Anything that can give you motivation and a sense of achievement is worth implementing within your working practices.

Have a Happy and prosperous New Year!

If you enjoyed this post why not sign up to get automatic email updates whenever I post something new?
• Subscribe to email updates • Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Follow me on twitter • Join me on Facebook

- leave a comment!
 

© Ken Reynolds Design