PRODUCTIVITY

3X Your Freelance Income With These 3 Foundational Practices

My main takeaways from 13 years of freelancing

U-Ming Lee
9 min readDec 1, 2020

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Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.

I started freelancing and working-from-home 13 years ago when I found myself to be temperamentally unsuited to the corporate 9–5.

To adapt, I’ve had to develop a set of practices to level up my productivity as a freelancer.

Since so many people have been thrust, willingly or unwillingly, into WFH by the pandemic, I felt it would be timely to share the routine that has served me well for most of the past decade.

How I Felt When I Started Freelancing

There’s nothing wrong with feeling overwhelmed by freelancing when you start doing it for the very first time.

I cringe when I look back at how bad I was when I first started out freelancing in 2007.

I was terrible at time management. I would pull all-nighters to meet client deadlines. The haphazard preparation showed in the substandard quality of my work.

Then, when I found a second client who was willing to take a chance on me, offering me a higher hourly rate than my first client, I ghosted my first client.

Like I said, I was bad.

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U-Ming Lee

I write about business, finance, and freelancing life. | How to contact me: https://linktr.ee/uming.lee