Here are a few tips to make sure you get the best out of your work by keeping focused.

1. Keep Regular Business Hours

Something that you don’t want to do is work on a project for too long during a single day. The best thing to do is to stick to a set amount of time not unlike a 9-5 job. The best thing is that you can decide when those hours are. This will allow you to keep yourself focused on your work as you know exactly when you need to get it done and under your own times.

For example, take a couple of hours off during an afternoon and make the work up later in the week or start work early and finish early. The point is that you need to give yourself enough time away from the work so you can enjoy yourself.

2. Create your own Work Space

Creating your own working space is all about reducing distractions. Try working in a dedicated area of your house where you can focus without any distractions. If that isn’t possible then consider renting out a desk elsewhere.

If you lack space or money for creating your own workspace then look at your computer itself. Create a separate user account that you use for work purposes only. Cut off access to anything that you don’t need to get your work done.

Create a new user account to help you focus on your work.

3. Remove Distractions

If you are unable to create your own physical working space for yourself, then you need to remove any distractions that are nearby. At least try to reduce the amount of clutter on your desk by leaving your mobile phone and any other major distractions out of reach.

4. Work on your own Personal Project(s)

Working on your own project is a great way to get away from the, sometimes frustrating, world of client demands. Creative freedom is something that all designers love, so by creating your own projects for you to design, develop and maintain you can keep your work varied.

Personal projects also give you the opportunity to do something slightly different so you’ll be able to learn new things and pickup new techniques that you’ll be able to carry over to your day-to-day work.

5. Reduce Interruptions

If you were to ask freelancers what is one of their main annoyances when trying to focus on work, interruptions would be high on the list. Interruptions will cause you to lose focus on a project as it can take you out of the moment of designing or developing.

The only way to get around this is to be vigilant in dealing with interruptions themselves. You don’t have to answer every phone call or email immediately. You can always come back to them later. In fact, it may be better to make calls or reply to emails in a single batch rather than multiple times a day to prevent that stop/start feeling.

6. Take Breaks

A big benefit of working for yourself is that you can take breaks and go off and do whatever you want when you want. Whenever any of your work is getting to you or causing you to lose focus in any way whatsoever, take ten minutes out and go and do something to take your mind off work. If you need to take longer then make sure it doesn’t keep you from getting your work done.

Go for a walk, play a video game, take a rest or anything you can do to return to your work more focused may be exactly what you need to do now and again. If you have to do it on a daily basis or even two or three times a day, ultimately do whatever works for you.

7. Pace Yourself

Following on from taking breaks, you need to pace your work out throughout the day so you don’t get bogged down on one task. Try and split your day up as much as you need to. Keeping focus may require you to work on a couple of projects a day to mix things up and keep things interesting. If you are unable to do that by only working on one project at a time try switching between different tasks on the same project.

Once again, it comes down to what works best for you but make sure you try many different ways of dealing with pacing out your working day. Think of it as personal A/B testing. Try a couple of different methods and then continue with the one that gives you the best results.

8. Motivation

As you know, not all projects will be dream jobs, in fact most of them won’t be anywhere near that. You will have to find other ways to motivate yourself when dealing with these projects such as pay or even simply by always trying to keep improving your work no matter what the project is.

Whatever it is that keeps you motivated on a project, make sure you keep it in mind as it will motivate you to keep focused on your work.

I think it is the most effective way of improving your work and here are eight reasons why it will.

1. Learn More

One of the things that you’ll have to do to ensure high quality work on a blog is to do plenty of research. Writing about a topic requires adequate research in order for you to write quality articles. Obviously this means that you will learn a lot more about topics that you write about.

You can tie this in with the work you are currently doing. If you’re about to design a new site that incorporates an admin area, writing something constructive about admin areas will force you into researching admin areas and therefore benefit your current work as well as future work.

2. Time Management

Time management can be a tricky task for designers. One of the benefits of being a designer is the variety of work but it can also make it more difficult to manage time effectively.

Blogging will help you manage your time better. Setting deadlines for when you post articles is a good way of getting used to working to a set time. Even if you only blog every two weeks, you will notice an improvement in your time management skills over time.

3. Build up a Library of what you’ve learnt

Of course you can bookmark articles you see but there’s so much great content out there that you may forget about it or it may get lost in the noise. The benefit of writing it yourself is that you will almost certainly remember what you wrote.

When combined with the research you have to do to write a blog post, blogging becomes a very useful way of remembering any problems or topics that you have research and solved previously.

4. Improve Writing and Communication Skills

Communication in any job is extremely important. Especially in website creation as often there will be multiple teams communicating about various aspects of the site such as content, design, development and marketing. Writing regularly will help you communicate effectively and reduce time wasted explaining things.

Writing a blog is a great way of improving your writing and communication skills, as the more you write the better you will become. My writing has improved hugely since starting Inspect Element. It still isn’t at a level I’m 100% happy with just yet but it has definitely had a positive effect at my day job.

5. Marketing

Even if your blog is an extension of your own portfolio and you’re a freelancer, you will instil confidence in your current client base as well as potential clients because you will be demonstrating that you are great at what you do and you know what you’re talking about. It can also help clients learn more about yourself and will make your site and service appear more personal. It can also have the added benefit of referring them to a blog post when a request that you don’t agree with is made, as long as you have written about it previously.

Don’t forget the fact that you will learn something about marketing on the web, assuming you want your blog to be read by as many people as possible.

6. Networking

By writing a blog and if it is any good, chances are that you’ll attract the attention of other designers and bloggers. Designers and bloggers that have more experience than you may ask you to help out on their blog by guest posting or collaborating on work. Not only will this help promote yourself but you will learn from other designers who are more experienced.

Networking may lead to other opportunities to work on bigger, more challenging projects. One of the ways that I believe is the best to get the best out of what you do is to continue challenging yourself. It will keep you more engaged in whatever you do which will turn you into a better designer.

7. Maintaining a Site

Often when working in agencies the majority of web design and development work is completed and then handed off to the client, never to be seen again. When you own your own site you will understand how to design and develop sites that are updated on a regular basis and what are the limitations and requirements that go into that.

Maintaining your own site will also give you the opportunity to do some usability testing and give you an insight as to what techniques work well or not. Obviously designing a blog is different to designing a non-blog site for a client but you will still learn plenty that can be applied to your day job.

8. Work for Yourself

Working for yourself by designing, developing and writing your own blog is a great way to get away from the demands of your clients or bosses. It introduces more variety into your work and allows you to create work that you really love.

Now of course, you may love the work that you do for your clients or bosses but there is nothing quite like calling the shots yourself. Who doesn’t like a bit of creative freedom now and then?

Unfortunately this is a Mac OS X only feature. I had hoped that Safari 4 on Windows would support it but no luck. A quick search reveals that there doesn’t seem to be a plugin that can replicate this functionality in Firefox which is a shame. Hopefully someone out there is developing one, or planning to!