If you haven't already heard, block working is certainly the trendy way of getting things done at the moment. I recently applied it to my working week and it has pretty much freed up one entire day most weeks.
If you haven't heard about this before, block working is a way of doing certain related tasks back to back to save time. Similar to doing a weekly food shop rather than a daily one. I am usually a late adopter to these things, and this was no exception. But after my girlfriend explaining the merits, I thought I would give it a go.
It is the single best thing that I have changed to the way I work. It allows me to produce far more Fstoppers content, start a YouTube channel, always be on time for instagram content, and still keep on top with actually being a photographer. The actual concept seems pretty obvious, and I am sure many of you already do it without calling it block working, but if it isn't something you do, give it a go and you will be amazed at just how much more work you can get done. In this video I show you how I go through my working week and plan it. Allowing for the obvious changes to plan that happen as photographers and explaining how I deal with the u-turns that professional life throws at me.
I think where it can really become effective is for those who are pushing photography on the side of a full or part time job. Making sure that you utilize the hours that you have available is really important. By aligning this with your weekly and monthly goals, I am certain that you would get far more done.
Let me know if you have any other time saving work hacks.
"The great thing about being a Freelancer is the free time in between".
To which I add: "Spending that free time trying to fill it up with paying jobs".
Another point, I find it hard to think of anything that is unimportant AND urgent. Unimportance renders the task non-urgent by definition. Important tasks urgent or not but unimportant tasks have earned their non-urgency fair and square.
I am fortunate to be very busy and shoot 2-6 times a week with an average of 3 shoots per week. Most are architecture but some commercial portraiture. The challenge is scheduling, as buildings are scheduled for completion that always goes long and thus needs re-scheduling. Requests for new dates means juggling other clients and so on as the calendar conflicts cascade.