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Performance anxiety is a part of life. We all have it. It drives us to work harder and improve at what we do, but too much of it can also kill your creativity, drain your energy and severely impact productivity.

Freelancing comes with its fair share of anxiety provoking conditions. The solo aspect of it alone can be scary, not to mention the variability in income, and if you’re new at it, the inevitable learning curve when it comes to business skills.

A healthy level of performance anxiety that gets your heart pumping and sharpens your attentiveness can be an asset if you know how to make the most of it. But how do you regain control when anxiety starts to run the show?

1. Learn to recognize when anxiety becomes a problem. Avoidance is the hallmark of anxiety-dominated thinking. Procrastination, perfectionism and creating distraction are all ways of avoiding tasks that cause anxiety. If you find yourself perpetually preparing and perfecting projects but missing deadlines, or doing low priority work while high priority projects suffer, anxiety may have the upper hand. Ask yourself if performance anxiety is pushing you to perform better or causing you to freeze up.

2. Take a deep breath. When you’re anxious, your breathing becomes shallow. Breathe deeply instead. Breathe all the way down into your stomach. It has an instant calming effect and brings more oxygen to the brain so you can focus.

3. Set priorities with a calm mind. Trying to problem solve in the throes of anxiety is never a good idea. Make a time management plan when your mind is clear. When you’re tempted to spend all your time on one project to the detriment of everything else, consult the plan you created when you were a little more sane, and follow it.

4. Spend half an hour worrying. A certain level of worry helps you plan for the future. But worried thoughts that intrude and distract you will drain your productivity like nothing else. Set aside 30 minutes each day to worry. Get really worked up about everything you fear could go wrong. Write it all down. Then put it away and go back to work. If you find yourself worrying again, tell yourself to save it for next time. Don’t do this right before you go to bed. Plan to do something specific immediately afterwards, and don’t drag it out.

5. Commiserate. In a 9-to-5 job, there are coworkers around that can help you with a reality check every once in awhile. You compare notes about things, and when you’re worried, you have people to talk to. With solo work, it’s important to create that kind of social network for yourself. Talk to friends about how projects are going. Share your fears and let them remind you how focused and talented you are. Network with other freelancers. Read Freelance Switch. Remind yourself that you’re not alone.

Kathryn Stinson is a beginning freelance writer and therapist-in-training.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Although there are numerous bright aspects to freelancing, day in day out it’s not easy to keep focused and keep producing your best work for clients. Focus can easily be lost, direction shortsighted, and shortcuts taken. There are a few things you can do to relieve a major chunk of this pressure and stress and start leading a lot more simple freelancing life.

Take Away The Unnecessary

Keep asking yourself, does this “something” add anything to my life? If you have to think about an answer to the question for more than a few seconds, it doesn’t. Remove it from your life. Throw it away. Clear out the space visually and mentally.

There’s no use keeping around a piece of digital material (RSS feed, song, file, bookmark) if it’s not adding anything to your life or helping you in some way. Try to simplify things down and keep only the essentials, both in the material and the evolving digital world.

Moving from a desktop computing setup to a notebook based setup comprising of a MacBook Pro helped my digital cleanliness propagation. Six months ago, I migrated over 1TB of data into under 100GB, while in the process learned a lot about what kind of data is really needed to be kept and what can be tossed out.

Live For Now

Stop living for the day where you will own the faster computer, sexier car, bigger home. Start for living for today where you have the computer you’re reading this text on, the car you have parked in your garage, and the roof you have over your head.

It’s important to have these things in your sight, but don’t let them be the focus of your life. Let this minute, this current day be your task at hand. Enjoy it for what it is and what you have. Stop being materialistic and live for experience.

Goals Are Essential

Where would you like to be in six months, one year, five years away? While focusing on the current day, it’s important to have things to aim for, to have plans of where you’re going in life rather than simply living year in and year out. Set yourself goals on what you’d like to achieve in a certain period of time. Keep these somewhere where they can be openly viewed, and set time to reflect upon them.

Ease The Workload

Keeping on a relative point to the first point mentioned, there are dozens, if not hundreds of ways you can make your life more simple. Find workarounds to tasks which you don’t enjoy. Find ways to delegate and remove tasks which you dread thinking about from your daily life. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Hate doing the housework? Hire a cleaner. If it’ll make you happier and improve your life, it’s worth the money - or as it could be otherwise called, it’s worth the investment.

Just Do It

Sometimes people can get too caught up in a GTD mind-frame. They’ll write each and every task which comes in on their to-do list, and take the appropriate steps to complete it. However, some tasks can be done right away, avoiding stress at a later stage.

For me, if something actionable will take less than 5 minutes to do I will do it right away. The task does not get added to my to-do list. Instead, it gets done as soon as it reaches one of my data collection points, and it doesn’t cause me to procrastinate - which means no stress. While some tasks are too large and sophisticated to apply this method to, the general rule to stick to is this: if it will take five minutes or less, just get it done rather than placing in on the back-burner.

Do it and it’s done. The phrase to keep in mind - I recommend you print it out and stick it on the wall behind your workstation.

Glenn Wolsey is a freelance content creator living in Rotorua, New Zealand.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com