Managing time as a freelance
Becoming a freelance gives you the freedom to pick and choose the jobs you want to do… but this can also come with unsociable hours and commitment clashes. Here’s how to best manage your time as a freelance…
One of the big issues I had when I turned freelance on a full-time basis was managing my time. Having previously had the assurance of a fixed working pattern – albeit one that took up 14 hours of my day – I entered the freelance world without much of a calendar strategy.
Planning my freelance work remained ad-hoc for months. I’d do a shift for a client one day, have a meeting with another the next, and cram in a breaking story of a third between my hours at a fourth publication. An unordered, unplanned freelance life proved to be hectic and uncontrollable – like constantly running faster to stay on the hamster wheel.
There becomes a moment for most freelancers when they are faced with a choice about their weekly structure. This comes when they acquire enough clients to subsequently require a proper plan. Three, four, five clients all suddenly want you to work on their projects, to respond to their emails, to jump on their Zoom calls.
You cannot commit to everything at once because duties inevitably overlap. And this is where managing your time as a freelance makes the difference between ad-hoc employment and becoming a professional at your job.
It perhaps took me too long to realise planning ahead was paramount if I was to not only retain my current clients but create new business relationships with boundaries set in from the start.
Managing time between multiple clients and your personal admin can be challenging
Balancing work and clients
One of the core differentials many new freelancers forget to address when starting out is recognising what is personal work and what is client work. Just like if we work full-time in one profession, we have our personal duties such as HR training, planning our meetings, buying a travel card for the week, etc. We also have to do the work we’re actually paid for, whether that be reporting on breaking news, designing a new conservatory or harvesting potatoes.
As a freelance, you’re responsible for both your personal work (completing your self-assessment tax return, managing invoices, buying an ergonomic keyboard for your home office, etc) and your client work (physically doing the work for your clients, finding new clients, maintaining client relationships, etc).
It’s best to get a good picture of what these duties – both personal and client – look like over the course of a week or month. So, if you’re struggling with balance it’s best to write down all the personal work jobs you need to do in one column, and all the client jobs in another. Assign timeframes to each duty – and thus calculate in a week how much time you need to spend on personal work, and how much on client work.
Once you have done this, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how much time you need to allocate to specific tasks. For example, in a 40-hour working week you may need:
6 hours personal work
30 hours client work
= 36 hours total
In this instance, you theoretically have four hours unallocated within your working week. From here, you now know you’ve got the time to chase a new client, or perhaps set up that website you’ve been planning on developing.
Freelance time tips
Understanding how much time you have ‘preallocated’ to personal work and client work is one thing, but actually acting upon these allocations can be difficult. We all have days when we’re just not firing properly and it’s incredibly hard to feel motivated if we have a mountain of jobs to get through.
Rather than scrambling at the bottom of that mountain, I find the best way to get through personal and client jobs in a working week is to prioritise in a calendar structure.
The first thing to do is take your list of duties – both personal work and client work – that you wrote down earlier and consider when you would do this work. Some of it may be time sensitive and require you to work flat out on a Tuesday, while other bits can be done on a Tuesday morning. I find it is best to do this this allocation is on a Friday, when I’m looking ahead to the upcoming week. You may realise that your week consists of:
Personal work
1 hour bank admin and invoices
30 minutes responding to emails
1 hour call with accountant
2 hours meeting with possible client
1 hour learning a new business skill
30 minutes writing a LinkedIn post
Client work
5 hours for Client A
3 hours for Client B
4 hours for Client C
Full day (8 hours) for Client D
10 hours for Client E
Making a list of all these tasks for the coming week is one thing, but how do you prioritise it all? I find that bunching together small, non-time sensitive tasks together works incredibly well. In this instance it would probably be those smaller personal work tasks above. As for when I do them, I usually set aside Monday morning for my personal work – but it’s worth experimenting to find a time that suits you. Perhaps you prefer doing ‘smaller’ jobs once a big job is out the way: say, using the remaining hours of the day after working for Client A all morning. Rather than then trying to cram in another client, it may be more beneficial to use those final hours before you put your computer away for smaller personal tasks.
Prioritising
The big thing I struggled with for months was prioritising. Without a calendar in place, I always rushed into Monday morning and tried to do too much at once, and simply ticked off jobs on a big Word doc. It often meant me working all day and into the evening on sporadic tasks. I wasn’t in control of work. This is obviously not the optimal way to work or live. It’s taken me a long time to realise that creating a work calendar – and sticking to it – is key to getting all my tasks done in one week.
Of course, I don’t always get everything done in a week. We’re all human and sometimes there’s just too much on, or other more pressing matters get in the way. That’s life. But the work calendar… well… it works. This is a typical Monday for me. I set aside the morning for business work, there’s a client call also booked in, I like to do an hour of personal work on Mondays and the rest is allocated to client work.
My typical Monday prioritises business work and personal growth, with clients less of a priority
It’s also worth stressing that setting up a work schedule doesn’t always solve issues around managing time as a freelance. After all, one project you do with a client may take double the amount of time you expected, which may then throw the rest of your week out of schedule. In fact, as you can see above my RT work is going to clash with my weekly business meeting at 4:30pm. So I’ll have to address this!
Constant changes are just part of work and the best advice I can offer to someone who is experiencing this is to evaluate and assess what you can do next time when you plan your upcoming week. If it feels as though a particular project is taking longer than expected, then factor that into your structure. Likewise, treat your calendar not as a fixed instruction but as a guide. It is malleable, just as we all are.
Tips for prioritising work
Structure your days Don’t overload days with too much work as this risks burn-out. Having a fixed time for lunch and when to stop work for the day is a great habit to get into
Plan the week before If you can, set aside even just 15 minutes of a Thursday or Friday and structure your upcoming week. I use Google Calendar to create a day-by-day structure of what I need to do, and when I’m going to do it
Factor in regular work Understand that regular work will require your attention every week. I find setting aside the same time/day each week for regular work is ideal for creating structure
Be prepared for surprises We can’t pre-plan everything that happens in a working week. You may get a call from your accountant asking to update something urgently, or a prospective new client may get in touch and request a meeting. So, be prepared to reshuffle that calendar around at short notice
Trust your structure As mentioned earlier, sometimes work takes longer than expected. But by setting out your calendar every week you’ll be able to mould and shape it to suit you. The weekly structure I started out with is nothing like the one I use now
Remember life exists Being a freelance doesn’t mean you have to be working all the time (something I took some getting used to!). If you’re struggling to split your time between work and life, then add blocks of ‘free time’ or ‘life’ into your calendar. Even if it’s 7pm to 11pm, the block will remind you to stop working too much and will certainly help your balance, happiness and productivity in the long-run
Photos by Fakurian Design and Firmbee.com on Unsplash