At the end of the summer, I got together with a couple of other freelancers to offer small accountability groups to the Leapers community. We ran our first group in October and are now part-way through a second round.

The approach we’ve taken to running the groups is that we are both facilitators and participants. And the feedback suggests that this benefits both us and the other group members:

I think Ece, Matthew and Emma have done a fantastic job and it’s good that they also get involved rather than just telling us what they’d do.

As you might expect from something I’m involved in, there are ample opportunities for reflection throughout the experience. These largely focus on what’s happening each week but I also think it’s worth zooming out to reflect on the past six weeks as a whole.

During that time, learning from observations about how I have been working, and seeing how others approach their work, I’ve made a few changes:

• using Monday’s intention setting session to create a weekly to do list (rather than working off my entire backlog)
• including personal and creative activities among my things to do
• allocating time blocks during the week for each project or task
• using the virtual co-working sessions for specific tasks I’ve been avoiding

What I’ve noticed is that I’ve become more efficient. In the past, I’ve been prone to faffing especially when I’ve got lots of little tasks to complete. Not only am I finishing all of my ‘must do’ tasks for the week but I’m also then able to move on to some of the ‘nice to do’ stuff as well. The greatest aid to all of this is knowing that at the start of the week I publicly committed to doing the work and come Friday I want to report back that I have made progress.

Getting things done week to week is only one of the goals of this group, for me. Another is to improve the way I work with a view to eventually spending less time at work. As the weeks go by, I feel I’m making steps towards this longer term goal.

We’re currently running these accountability groups for freelancers via Leapers. If you’re interested in exploring how they could run in the context of your work do get in touch.