Drawing the Line Between Personal and Business Life
Credit: Nik Muhd Faris Fathi on Flickr
A topic that affects freelancers, especially those new to the freelance world, is separating your personal life and ‘me time’ from work. After all, if you’re sitting at home in your underwear working on a design for a client – it doesn’t really feel much like work.
To better understand why freelancers have this problem, let’s look at why workers of the typical 9-5 office job don’t have to deal with this as much as us work-at-home types. When you take on a typical job, you’re given: your hours to be at work, a work email, and typically a phone number (or extension number), which your boss, and depending on the type of work, possibly your clients know this.
If you work for a small marketing agency and a client needs to get in touch with you at the end of the day, a quick glance at the watch to see that it’s 4:30pm means that the client needs to ring you quickly, as you’ll soon be getting ready to leave. If it’s after your 5pm finish, or an out of hours time such as the weekend, then the contact mediums are obvious; send an email or leave a voicemail. Since your hours are 9-5 on Monday-Friday, it’s easy to work out approximately when you’ll get the all important message.
The problem freelancers face is many of us don’t work set hours. For example, I try and keep my working hours between 9am and 4pm, but sometimes I’ll work into the evenings, or if I’m not busy one weekend then I might work a Saturday to get on top of my workload. Not all clients know this – because often I don’t know this either. That’s one of the things about freelancing – hours can be decided there and then if they need to be.
Switching Off
When an office worker leaves the office, he or she will leave behind their phone and probably their work computer, which they use to check emails. Essentially they are now ‘unplugged’ from work and free to go and do whatever they please. The only phone call they’ll receive from work will most likely be from their boss in the case of an emergency.
Because of this, my work life is already bordering on my personal life.
Similar to a lot of freelancers who can’t afford the luxury of multiple machines, the laptop I use to surf YouTube, read blogs and occasionally check Facebook is also the laptop I use to communicate with my clients, write design briefs and so on. Likewise, the application I use to read my personal mail is also the application that I use to read my work email. Because of this, my work life is already bordering on my personal life.
Not all new freelancers offer the opportunity to be contacted via phone, but those who do may be tempted to use their personal contact number (for the first few contacts) until they can necessitate a second phone. Back when I started out, I made this mistake on one of my first clients who had deadlines to meet and needed to keep in touch with me via phone for progress updates.
This wasn’t too big a deal when I received a daily phone call at 3pm, but when you get the odd out-of-hours text and a quick, “sorry I had to call you on the weekend but…” phone call, I quickly came to see this was a bad idea. I can’t switch off my personal phone, because it’s: how my friends get in touch with me, how my family get in touch with me, how I’m contact in emergencies and so on.
The First Step: Email
Primarily, freelancers will use email as a preferred method of communication. It allows us to convey information, images and other media as well as hyperlinks and so on. Another reason for favoritism towards email is that it gives us time to think. Phone calls are very on the spot and need answers straightaway, whereas with emails we can plan our message and then send it once we’re happy with it.
Whilst I’m not trying to compare a client to a dog, the saying “give them an inch and they take a mile” comes to mind.
The problem is that it’s all to easy to sign up to a freelance job site or job board with a personal email – after all it’s the one you check constantly and the one that’s tied to your fancy smartphone. Herein lies the problem; your work life and your personal life now come to the same inbox. It’s now impossible to simply check up on your personal emails without tripping up over a few client emails nagging about design revisions or similar.
Once you send that first reply at 8pm just because you happened to be checking your emails, a client is now aware that you are contactable out of hours via email – and you’ll reply too. Whilst I’m not trying to compare a client to a dog, the saying “give them an inch and they take a mile” comes to mind.
Email is fantastic. You can setup as many email addresses as you please, to whatever domain you want to buy and you can have them delivered to a myriad of devices. So if email addresses are so easy to come by, why is it that so many of us use one for everything? If you operate a personal portfolio or site, rather than use your typical [firstname]@[portfolio.com], why not change the first part to ‘work’? If you wanted to still keep it a bit personal, use your initials or full name instead – it still looks personal and professional but it’s not your main email.
The Second Step: Phone
Cellular phone’s are a little different to email in that they’re not a free resource, the initial investment is the phone itself and then comes the monthly bill that goes with it.
Freelancers know all to well that there can be dry patches where the money coming in might not marry up to the money going out. For this reason we all try and keep our costs down. If it’s possible to only have to pay one phone bill, a lot of new freelancers will opt for this method.
The thing is, setting up a new phone nowadays is extremely simple and very inexpensive for the service it provides you with. I speak as a resident of the UK here, so things may be a little different where you are, but multiple mobile phone companies offer a free pay as you go sim card and sell mobile phones from as little as £10. Of course, you need to top up £10 to activate it, but essentially a second phone number and phone has a cost of £20.
Not only does this help separate your work and personal life, but it also improves your professional appearance by showing that you’ve made that extra bit of confidence inspiring effort.
The Third Step: IM
Not everybody uses instant messaging to communicate with clients, it’s all down to personal preference. Personally I do use instant messengers with certain clients if the situation requires it. Although I hate myself for it, I try to avoid phone calls if I can and opt for an instant messaging session, the problem here is that unlike a phone call you can’t really hang up.
Although a lot of people base there personal instant messaging solely around Facebook chat, I still use AIM and MSN to keep in touch with a lot of people, so I tread carefully to keep my personal and business IM accounts separate from one another.
The Benefits of Skype
A service that’s definitely worth mentioning here that can help your freelancing business is Skype. I have only recently started using the service as a useful contacting tool and I’m pleased with the results. Skype has a home business package which has some great paid features such as: calling landlines and mobiles from Skype, having a landline number for your Skype account and screen/file sharing.
If your client uses Skype you also benefit from the standard free calling that Skype supports. Depending on the type of client and project, video conferencing might be something you’re also interested in. Some clients might have a preference for face to face meetings and video conferencing can be a great alternative to travelling to meetings constantly. Of course, there are competing services to consider like Google Voice as well.
Drawing The Line
The thing you’ll notice about the methods of contact I’ve recommended; a work email, work phone number, work IM accounts and a Skype account, is that they can all be switched off at 5pm or whenever it is you finish for the day – just like your standard job.
Where you draw the line between personal time and work time is important. What I’ve gone over today are just some of the ways you can keep your two lives divided – the line can go much deeper than that.
You draw your own line, but where you draw it can have a big effect on your freelancing career. It’s preferable to try and keep things personal between you and some clients, but giving a client too much reign can start to deteriorate what little personal time you may have. It’s all gravy until your client starts asking for design updates on your Facebook wall.
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Nik Muhd Faris Fathi.
Leave a Comment
There’s a lot a truth in this post, well done! It is a thin line between work and play when you’re working from home that can get blurred very easily if you don’t watch out. Recently I had to gently but firmly tell (off) a client for phoning me after midnight about the paper I was editing for him. No, I said, he hadn’t hauled me out of bed but like any one else I was entitled to having my evenings free. End of.
I’ve got a Skype account with the paid phone number feature and unlimited calling, and it comes out to a few bucks per month. And while it’s very convenient and cheap, I’ve had trouble with call quality. My home ISP is great (Verizon Fios) so I don’t think it’s a connection speed issue. Just a Skype issue. As a business solution, I don’t think it’s viable.
I recently got a Google Voice number which I’ve been using for my business, and that’s been great. It affords me the call quality I want by utilizing existing phone lines to make and receive calls (calls to my GV number route to my home phone line and/or mobile), while also giving me the freedom to direct which phones ring (or don’t) when someone calls the business line, or forward calls directly to voicemail. So after hours, I can essentially unplug from work.
You can even set a custom ring schedule. So if you don’t want business calls to ring after a certain hour, on weekends, etc, you can set that all up in Google Voice.
And it’s free. Definitely recommend any freelancer use a GV number to separate your work life from your home life.
I’ve also set up a dedicated office space in my house, so I can literally leave the office for the night and keep my home life and work life very separate.
Hey Mike,
That’s odd, Skype is usually better quality than my mobile but I’m sure it’s different for different computers, connections and users. I’ve always wanted to try GV but it’s not available in the UK and doesn’t seem to be on its way over here anytime soon unfortunately!
I used to have this debate constantly with a fellow designer. I always keep 9-5 M-F business hours because I want my clients to know when they can expect a prompt reply and when they can’t. Even when I choose to work outside those hours, I don’t send any emails or other forms of communication because, as you said, it just communicates to the client that they can reach me any time.
That said, it goes both ways. If you’re not going to respond outside of business hours, you need to promptly reply to communication within business hours.
i go through this exact same debate with my business partner. we both work out of our homes, and granted, she is a mom with lots of other things to split her time around, but i believe our functioning, online, available hours should be 8-5, because that’s when our clients are working and their business is conducted. she “forgets” to open up her chat software until 9:30, 10am sometimes, and it’s a serious hamper to workflow for me when there are jobs we’re both part of when i can’t discuss and get feedback with her for up to 2 hours of the morning. she works frequently late at night, while i stop all work conversation (emails, phone calls, etc) at 5:00ish. then she will complain that she was up late working on stuff, or worked on weekends on such and such, and i always tell her, well, that’s your choice. i draw a pretty hard line, and i make it clear and clients honor that. but if she allows that line to blur, that’s what happens. in my experience, there is very very rarely anything that is so dire that it can’t wait until after 8am the next day, or monday on the event of a weekend.
Regarding the phone: I use Google Voice (https://www.google.com/voice/). You can get a free phone number that you can use publicly. Calls can be forwarded to a variety of numbers and you can control when they are to be sent through and when they should go to your personalized message. I can also check my voice messages on the Google Voice site, making it much like an email that gives me time to think.
I agree that the line is blurry when it comes to professional and personal life. I initially gave out my cell phone number and personal email address. Then, I created a work email that was connected to my smart phone. Every spare second I would check email and be working on client projects before I realized it.
What I am going to do is delete the access to work email on my smart phone and try only being able to check email from my iPad or laptop. Perhaps that will aid in keeping the line separate a bit.
While I agree with some points of views from this post, I have to say it that in the end is business and that’s how we earn our living. Without clients, I assure you’ll have no personal time to enjoy either.
You mentioned that regular employees unplug from work after 5PM and only their boss could contact them in case of emergencies. As freelancers, our client is the boss and if their website is down and call me with the emergency, heck yeah I have to go and fix the site even if is 8PM.
I also have clients on West coast (i’m on East). If I finish at 5PM my time, then those clients would have a very limited time to reach me.
I don’t mind checking my emails and responding even if is later.
In the end, I really enjoy my life style and keeping in touch with my clients is part of if.
I’d never think of a client as my “boss.” The freelancer/client relationship is more neutral. The minute I start looking at my clients like bosses and acting like that with them, that’s the minute they’ll expect me to be available any time they want to talk to me. I don’t work that way, and any client who would expect me to regard them as my boss isn’t a client I’d like to have.
I see your point Lucian, different areas of freelancing can require different levels of communication – for example if you also deal with the hosting of the website, then it’s true you should have some form of emergency OOH contact for dealing with downtime and the like.
However, as Mike said, I don’t think of clients explicitly as my boss. I require something from them (finance) and they require something from me (neutral). It is a much more balanced work arrangement than worker and master.
Thank you for this post. I just entered my third week as full-time freelance writer and am learning how important drawing a line between my work and personal life is. It helps that I’m married – otherwise I could see myself working 12 hour days, 6 days a week. But I told my wife that 6:00 is my quitting time and she helps me honor that.
I also found that having a room dedicated to my office is a big help. I generally only enter this room when it’s time to work. I use my desktop computer for work and my laptop for play.
If I have checked my emails out of hours and do not want to give the impression I am available that late, I will write my email response then and there and delay the delivery time until the next morning (through Outlook).
This way I know I will not forget about the email, can clear it from my mind and the client would never know it was done out of hours.
Well done! I Agree your line blurry when it comes to professional and personal life..
There is a truth with this post and if this post was a gun, I am surely got shot. As a freelancer, we are expected to be easily reached by clients especially if you are in a different timezone. In my online application I always say that I have a flexible time, just to get the impression that they can work with me and they can easily reach me when emergency comes. Well, this is the life of a freelancer.
Excellent post and advice here for all work from home people to follow. This can be problematic when you start out working from home and you are hungry for business. At some point though, you will need to separate these two sections of your life.
An easy way to draw a fine line between work and leisure as a freelancer is to work out of your house — recently, these coworking businesses have been popping up everywhere… http://www.coloft.com
Love this, although I agree that it’s important to switch off and have set working hours for me this is what makes my freelance design career so special.
The flexibility of hours means that I can work late some nights or weekends then go out for lunch with friends or to the beach with the kids, I am both a business woman and a mum to 3.
I doubt there are many careers out there that would allow me this privilege.
I use a VOIP (skype) phone and a skype phone number I only answer when I am not too busy this way I can screen the calls on the answering service and prepare what I’m going to say. I much prefer emails though.
You’ve hit it right on the nose! The issues you have addressed as challenges for the at-home freelancer couldn’t ring more true, and the tips you posted are great strategies of balancing it out. There are useful tools out there (i.e. Skype, as mentioned) that, luckily, are user-friendly and [sometimes] free, so one can only hope that more home workers utilize them. Ultimately, I agree that work and play should be separated as much as possible without one outweighing the other. Thank you for sharing this blog!