There’s some fascination that exists for people wanting to peek in on others’ working habits. How I work may not work for you. My early years of freelancing was a lot of experimentation in setting up a schedule, environment, and admin tasks.

If you haven’t already seen it, I list all of my work & life tools in one place. I generally don’t recommend anything I haven’t already tested and put in use before.

Daily Checks

On a daily basis, I have a set of recurring tasks, sometimes with reminders, that I program into my ToDoist.

  • I check my emails three times a day: 10:30 am, 1:30 pm, 3:30 pm. My client responsive hours are 11–4 pm. Usually, the first check involves archiving, sorting, and catching up. My Airmail app is very robust in what I can do with emails. I end up putting emails into the “To Do” tag when it’s something I have to reply to. The second and third-time checks are used for responding.
  • Feedly: I check once a day to catch up on news. I use the Pocket extension to bookmark anything I want to read later. I usually drink coffee while I’m working
  • Standard social media checks: I respond to any questions or DMs. Those who have tagged me in a post, I respond to later.
  • Check next day’s posts: make sure that they’re on target
  • Schedule: a good social media manager will schedule. It leaves room for creativity. My favorite is the ViralPost feature in Sprout Social- it determines when you’ll have the most engagement and schedules your posts accordingly.

Weekly Items

Content planning and creation is a weekly item for me. I have two days in the week (Monday and Friday) where I don’t take meetings. These are set aside as creative days: writing, photographing, etc.

While I use a spreadsheet to plan, I also have clients who use Trello to visually lay out their content calendar.

Monthly Items

  • Look ahead on the calendar: is there something happening in the next month that I should know about? Any special holidays or events?
  • Analytics: How was last month? Was it as good as expected?

For further reading, I wrote about how to optimize your workflow on Sprout Social.