Do you pride yourself on your administrative skills? If so, then you might be ready to take the plunge into freelancing, since strong admin skills are vital for success as a freelancer.

Here are some useful tips for transferring the administrative skills that you mastered in your office day job to the world of freelancing.

1. Time Management

First and foremost, time management skills are the ones that you need to perfect to get a successful start in the world of freelancing. A widely used skill in offices worldwide, it is time for you to take master this trait in your life as a freelancer too.

Typically, basic time management skills in the office are the usual ones:

• Meeting deadlines on time with quality work
• Maintaining a decent balance between your personal and professional life
• Using electronic calendars to avoid missing out on personal dates and events

You can use your time management skills to help manage your client’s time by judging things like how their day is broken up; if they have double-booked meetings; if they have too many unnecessary hours scheduled for just one meeting, and if there is enough traveling time available for them to depart from and arrive at different destinations for multiple meetings.

These super-simple time management techniques can be a bit hard to master but once you get used to them, they can help you be more efficient in your freelancing career and provide more timely assistance to your clients.

2. Organizing

Organizing your work is key if you want your projects to progress to the finish line as smoothly as possible.

Normally, it would be advised to declutter your workspace, your email and text inbox, and to keep your finances in order. In addition to this, suggestions would include using project management software to stay on track.

Other than getting your working regimen in order, organizing events is another major skill worth honing. Organizing meetings and social events are skills that require good coordination and planning from you. You can use these skills to coordinate a large job, organize parties for clients, or plan other events like a wedding.

3. Facilitating

Creative way number 3 is about getting two or more people to participate in a healthy discussion or, to achieve positive results, to help them engage in coordinated activities.

Facilitation, in the office, essentially relies on handling conversations, verbal dealings, and making the job easier for the client and yourself. As a regular part of one’s desk-job, you facilitate discussions between individuals for a meeting and use skills like listening abilities and time management to achieve a result for both; work and communicative skills among your colleagues.

Similarly, while freelancing, you can use these interpersonal skills to smoothly facilitate discussions between specific cliques and also use them in certain counseling gigs. If you want, you may also offer yourself as an arbitrator when a conflict among any of these groups rises.

4. Corresponding

Communication in the office is very frequent. You write letters, emails, memos, and articles. While each of these forms of contacting others houses unique styles and skills, they aren’t only for an office job.

Besides, while communicating through emails is efficient, letters show a personal touch; you can send them to your clients as a token of goodwill and appreciation.

These corresponding skills can help you carry out your freelancing activities like writing articles for your blog. Use these skills to help your writing professional pieces of writing, review, or write proof-read documents.

5. Bookkeeping

Generally, in the office, bookkeeping helps in keeping a smooth record of your financial handlings and maintaining your invoices on track. Some creative ways for you to use these skills in your life as a freelancer are:

• Creating budgets
• Observing and supervising financial requirements of a gig for a client
• Dealing with all the financial aspects related to a larger event
• Helping out others in financial planning or executing complete accounting functions
• Using bookkeeping/accounting software to keep accurate track of transactions

With these tips, you can get ahold of your financial records in short amount of time.

To conclude, your daily desk job may have been repetitive and monotonous but it does bring several useful skills to one’s life as a freelancer too.