Walking and other solutions to those common freelancer distractions

A good freelancer that uses an accountant in Richmond is also likely to keep up to date with all of the other aspects of their professional practice, training up their weaknesses and building on their strengths in such areas as making a proposal, negotiating a fee and marketing their services effectively. However, sometimes, there is a more elementary problem that the freelancer faces: the inability to concentrate and knuckle down to work.

This is a serious problem for any conscientious freelancer, given that every hour in which they are unable to motivate themselves means money lost. However attractive the low overheads of working from home can be, such an environment can also bring the greatest difficulties concentrating. There are many ways in which freelancers can recover their motivation and creativity and return to productive work once more, with one of them – taking a brisk walk – being the subject of a fascinating recent study in the Netherlands.

Anecdotes and literature have, for centuries, recommended going for a walk to those suffering ‘writer’s block’, and a Leiden University professor couldn’t pass up the opportunity to prove its effectiveness. In unveiling her findings, Prof Lorenza Colzato said that she had set volunteers convergent and divergent-thinking tasks to find conclusive evidence that creative powers could indeed be boosted by physical exercise. The test of each volunteer’s creative thinking was whether they could come up with ways of using a pen that didn’t involve writing, and sure enough, volunteers exercising four times a week outperformed those with more sedentary lifestyles.

The professor ensured the diversity of the test by also asking volunteers that exercised regularly and those that didn’t to find a common link between three words. Once more, it was those participants that spent more time regularly exercising that fared better on the test. The conclusion of the study was that a person’s brain was trained to “become more flexible in finding creative solutions” by physical exercise – although it didn’t seem to be a long-lasting edge, and also wasn’t as pronounced in people that were very physically fit. Nonetheless, the findings will intrigue many a freelancer using an accountant in Richmond (not, by the way, the worst place to go for a wander in the Surrey area).

Walking is not, of course, the only recognised technique for a freelancer whose concentration is flagging. Other known methods include switching off email, mobile phones and other frequent distractions, breaking down larger jobs into smaller, more manageable tasks with mini-deadlines and setting the morning alarm clock earlier. A freelance client of an accountant Richmond could also choose to perform certain tasks at a certain time of the day, only open an application when it is absolutely necessary for the task in hand and/or start with the easier work first, among the vast range of trusted concentration-boosting methods that probably haven’t been subject to a university study!

Editor’s Note: Freelancer Accounting (http://www.freelanceraccounting.com) are represented by the search engine advertising and digital marketing specialists Jumping Spider Media. Email: info@jumpingspidermedia.co.uk or call: +44 (0)20 3070 1959 / +34 952 783 637.