Suddenly you get out of bed and you realize that you do not have a boss or a schedule, and that your workplace and your home share the same building. Although it sounds good, the first days or even weeks were not easy.
After years of working for an employer, our life was completely programmed. Practically everything, almost effortlessly, has an order, a day and a time. For that reason, we needed to design our new routine. Creating it was easy. The problem was sticking to it.
Designing a routine is easy. What's hard is to stick to it. #startuplifestyle Click To Tweet
The first days we decided to work without a schedule, to see how we were adapting to our new reality. After a few weeks in “test” mode, we started to create a routine based on the experience we had acquired.
In order to force ourselves to get up early (8 a.m.), we made an agreement with a friend who was also freelance and set up a “daily meeting” based on Scrum methodology. This is a daily meeting where each member of the team shares what they did the previous day and what they are planning to do today. It is recommended to hold these meetings standing up so they are as short as possible, and no one relaxes too much. It is also important not to delve too deeply into the tasks, since this requires setting up collaborative meetings with the members implied. Since we have such a small team, we are not very strict. Skype meetings tend to drag on and sometimes we even use them for therapeutic purposes (we need to vent to someone!).
Thanks to the daily meeting, everyone has their own list of daily tasks. This allows us to plan our time better, be more productive and know the state of the project as well as what everyone is doing.
For the time being we make no difference between weekdays, weekends and bank holidays. That is good, because we can change our daily routines such as, for instance, shopping for groceries. The first few days we did that on weekends like most mortals, until we realized that we could go on weekdays and avoid overcrowding. These types of changes are making it possible for us to enjoy advantages that used to be out of our reach: much cheaper travel, going to the cinema on special cheaper days, and basically make use of the flexibility of our schedules to save money. Another routine is attending some sort of activity that serves as an inspiration and helps us disconnect from the daily routine once a week: exhibitions, conferences, workshops, trips…
As of today, we are still testing and incorporating improvements into our routine. Any idea will be welcome 😉
