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Time Management Tips for Freelancers

Posted 14 Dec 2009 - No Comments - leave yours now!

Life is pretty hectic. There are only so many hours in a day and they seem to fill up quite quickly. There are thousands of variables that make the situation worse each day. You have to find time to sleep and eat but most days are full with the exercise of doing something to make enough money so you have a decent place to sleep and nice stuff to eat.

Most people have a nice, clearly defined block of time to earn that money called a job, but it all becomes a little more complex when you work freelance.
The beauty of being an employee is that someone else tells you what to do, when to do it and gives you your reward at the end of the month if you manage to stick to the rules. To some that doesn’t sound all that nice, maybe not but it is quite easy when you compare it to working for yourself.

When you work for yourself you have to make your own rules the hard bit is sticking to them so you still get your reward at the end of the month. Being able to manage your time is the key to success when you work for yourself. Below are a few tips that I believe will help you when working for yourself.

Organisation
The beauty and curse of working for yourself is the fluid nature of your workdays. You are your own boss, you make the rules, that’s great right? Sure, but you still need to make sure that you do enough work to support the non-work portion of your life. This takes a little bit of doing because if you aren’t careful work and life might begin to bleed into each other.

Some people like to set strict working hours (8 per day & weekends off, for example), others like to keep their work time fluid but put a number on how many hours they need to work in each week.

Organisation needs to go a lot deeper than working hours though. You need to try to make sure that when you sit down to work, that’s all you have to worry about. You don’t want to be wasting work time filing because you’ve put it off for a month.

That’s why it’s useful to schedule certain maintenance tasks weekly. Give yourself a day or half a day to maintain your computers, perform backups, make sure your accounts are up to date etc.

Discipline
Once you are organised it then takes discipline to keep things that way. If part of your organisation is a strict schedule of work, you need to be disciplined enough to stick to it or all of the time you took working it out is wasted and useless.

In fact discipline is a massive factor in a freelances life, especially a creative freelancer. When you sit down to work you have to work!
Something that might help you to maintain your work ethic is to clear away all distractions. You might consider keeping your working area secluded, separate from where you relax and generally live your life.
Discipline can be a social killer though. Ask my fiance. She will happily list the number of times I’ve had to work instead of going out, or just spending a bit of time with her. Work will sometimes take over your life, and it takes a lot strength to get work done when you really don’t want to, but sometimes it has to be done.

Be Realistic
On the face of things it’s easy to assume that the more work you take on the bigger the rewards will be. Of course this is true, but is it really the best way to run a business and is it fair on the rest of your life?
You are only human, and you only have a certain number of hours in a work week, is it fair on yourself or your clients if you try to cram to much in? I try to run my business with a personal touch and feel my clients deserve my full attention when I’m working for them. I can’t do this if I’m constantly thinking about my next job.

The other thing you have to consider as far as realism is the amount of time you might spend on certain projects. It’s not easy to gauge how much time a design task will take because of the inherent elusiveness of creativity. It’s not like plumbing or carpentry where a job takes a finite amount of time, but there are similarities. With time and experience you will get better at judging design briefs and your own abilities, so you will always get better at estimating how long something takes.

Never be afraid to say no. It seems like simple statement, but in practice it can be very difficult. When people are throwing work at you it seems foolish to turn it down, but you have to “be realistic“. Can you give the job your full attention? Can you do the brief justice? Will taking this job on mean you have no personal life for the next two weeks? Will you be able to cope with the extra stress it will cause?

Balance
A happy freelancer is a busy freelancer, as long as they are not too busy! Balance is such a difficult thing to achieve but you will find yourself striving for it constantly. It’s that old chestnut, the work/life balance.
You work for yourself so the chances are that you love what you do for a living, but is it your whole life? Do you live to work or work to live?

I love what I do, and at the moment it does seem to take up a great proportion of my life. I’m saving for a wedding in 2011, trying to make my car payments, keeping up with the rent on my flat, making sure the fridge is full. I also want to start saving more money to do fun things! It’s difficult and it can become a grind.
I’m extremely lucky to have an understanding partner, but I also realise that I don’t want it to be this way forever. It is a struggle, and it will be for years to come, but I’m working towards that balance.

A few other things to consider:

Set goals – Break your days up by hitting self-defined targets throughout.

A Visual “To Do List” – The importance of ticking off tasks as you finish them is very under-rated and highly motivational.

Time Tracking – There are certain tools that can track the time you spend on jobs to make it easier for invoicing and to gauge how long similar tasks might take in the future.

Sub-Contracting – If you have contacts that you can trust to take on some of your excess work, it is a choice worth thinking about. Here’s is an article about the pro’s and con’s of trade work that might help.

Below are some links to other articles that have helped me with time management and that I hope you will also find useful.

Useful articles:

Time Management Tips for the Busy Freelance Designer – Fuel Your Creativity

15 Useful Project Management Tools – Smashing Magazine

Ultra-Procrastination: Avoid at ALL costs! – Freelancer Magazine.com

How do you manage your time? Do you have any interesting tips to add to my list? Don’t be shy leave me a comment and let me know.

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