The best way to track your productivity as a freelancer? (if not hourly paid)

hi @rum_julius I'm not a freelancer but I can give you my tips which have helped me in the past. In my opinion, being productive just means "did I make progress on the things I wanted to make progress on?"

1. Start everyday by creating a plan. What are you working on and what are your goals for this specific day?

2. Timebox yourself by focusing on specific projects for certain amounts of time. I think that a lot of productivity is based on focus. Here is a method the describes it: https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/time-blocking

3. End your day by reviewing a few wins and what you could have improved.

4. Sometimes if I am working on a project I will take screenshots of the project every two hours or so and compare my progress. If you're writing a report or building a website then the changes won't feel that big in the moment but when you compare it to a few hours or a day ago you will see your progress.

5. I really like the Panda Planner as a tool for setting priorities. They have a free online template: https://pandaplanner.com/

6. Be accountable to someone or something. I use Focusmate and Beeminder to keep me honest toward my goals.

Hope this helps!

I created a tool that showed me how many tickets were closed, how many were carried forward, how was my current load, did i improved week over week, what is my average time for closure and with this pace how much time it would take me to close open tickets etc.
I use github issues to create tickets and that acts as my source of data. I don't do daily tracking just review it on weekly basis.

My suggestion is to use one ticketing platform where all your activity is logged so that it becomes easier to track. Create different tags for e.g. marketing/development/admin etc. create sub tags for e.g. features/bugs/review etc. under development and make sure to log your progress. It could just be todo-inprogress-done or if you need more granular details you can log daily however i find that logging daily requires some kind of discipline and if you are not in habit of doing it than people find it cumbersome which is fine you can just stick to tdo-progress-done which is less taxing.

This works even when you are managing the teams. So once you get used to it. You will easily be able to figure out what is taking too much time, what needs attention etc.