Less is More: 10 Ways to Simplify Your Freelance Life
By Leo Babauta
A freelancer’s life is often everything but simple. Multiple projects being juggled, often along with a day job, emails and phone calls and IM, invoices and payments, time tracking and more.
It doesn’t have to be that complicated.
A simplified freelance life would be one with projects or assignments you love to do, but not so much that you are overloaded. You use simple tools, you work without distraction, you are lean and mean and have time for other things in life that you love.
It might sound like a fantasy, but it’s an ideal that can be achieved. In my life, I’ve reduced my amount of work while increasing my pay … reduced the amount of time I spend working, and the work that I still do is work that I really enjoy. I haven’t achieved perfect simplicity yet — it’s really a process, not a destination — but my life is greatly simplified now compared to only a year or two ago.
Here’s how to do it.
1. Identify complicators. What’s complicating your life? Or is it a who? Think about what stresses you out, what makes you overworked, what wastes your time. You might give this a few days, taking notes and making a list. Once you have a good list of complicators, you have a list of things you need to eliminate or simplify. That’ll take a bit longer, but in most cases it’s possible.
2. Identify the essential. What are the essential things in your life? The essential clients and projects? What do you love doing? Make a short list, as these are the things you want to keep as you get rid of the other stuff. Read this article for more.
3. Scale down your work. This will sound impossible, but you really can scale back. You just have to set limits, and stick to them. Let’s say that you’re currently doing 50 hours of freelance work a week (as an example — your number may be wildly different). And let’s say you only want to work 30 hours a week. Well, set a 6-hour-a-day schedule for 5 days, and stick to it. You’ll have less time to do the same amount of work, but that’ll actually force you to focus on the essential tasks, cut out the less important tasks, and stop wasting time. You’ll end up doing less work, but the work you do is the work that counts, and the work that pays well (see Item #10).
4. Simplify your tools. While tools are supposed to help us get our work done, often they can get in the way by being too complicated. If you spend too much time tweaking the tool rather than doing your work, you might consider a simpler tool. If you use many tools, you might consider using fewer. It just makes the work simpler.
For example, as a writer, I can use Microsoft Word, with its 10,000 different features. But it’s slow, and I don’t use the vast majority of those features. Most of them are just distractions. Instead, I use AbiWord, Google Docs, Dark Room or WordPad. These are all much simpler, with almost no features except the ability to type text and maybe do some formatting like bold and italics. But they do the job I need to do, and nothing else. It allows me to focus on the text.
5. Reduce distractions. Along those lines, if you do a lot of work on the web, you’re probably constantly facing the distractions of the web. Email, for one, and IM and Twitter and the millions of fascinating sites and forums and services. But this morning, as I write this, my Internet connection is down. And guess what? I’m more focused on my work than ever before. Sure, I need Internet connections to do my work, to do research or to communicate or to do a bunch of other tasks. But being disconnected from these distractions for a couple of hours actually simplifies my choices and allows me to really focus.
I highly recommend that you identify your distractions, and find ways to minimize or eliminate them while you’re working. Phones, TV, other people, visual clutter in your workspace, noise, food, little random tasks that you can use to procrastinate on the important ones.
6. Evaluate your commitments. It’s good to do this at least once a month. Make a list of all your commitments, large and small. Projects and assignments, meetings, appointments, various roles in your life such as church or boards or committees or sports or hobbies or civic groups or friends or family. Are you overcommitted? It’s not only possible, but likely. There are a million demands on our time, but while it’s easy to say yes, it’s not so easy to fulfill all of them and stay sane. Simplify your life by only keeping those commitments that mean something to you, that give you the most value. Trust me, if you can cut back on even a few of your commitments, you’ll feel a huge sense of relief and satisfaction.
7. Reduce expenses. Make a list of all your expenses as a freelancer — you might already have such a list (it’s often called a budget). If you don’t, this list of expenses can be enlightening. If you have a lot of expenses, that means you have to do more work. Keep yourself small and lean, and work with a bare minimum of expenses. That’ll free you to do less work, to cut back on those projects that don’t give you much value for your time.
8. Cut back on email. You know you do it too much. Sure, email is a necessity for the modern freelancer. We couldn’t survive without it. But we can survive without checking it every few minutes. Turn off email notifications and schedule your email checking. Once an hour is the most you’ll need to check. If you really want to simplify, schedule your email checking and processing to once or twice a day. Life will go on, you really won’t suffer, and your life will be much simpler.
9. Learn to say no. This is the simplifier’s most valuable tool. If you can’t say no, you will accept too many commitments and complications. You will accumulate stuff and tasks. Learn to say no in order to reduce the stuff in your life. Read this article for more.
10. Increase pay. This sounds like a nice goal, but not necessarily a realistic one, I bet. But it can be done. How? By doing great work, and then asking for more. If you prove yourself to be valuable, you can set your pay (within reason). Especially if you make it clear to your clients that you are trying to cut back on how many assignments you take on — if they want to keep you, they’ll pay more. This can be a longer-term goal, over the course of months, but it can be done.
Oh if only!
These are great tips. I think it’s a trial and error sort of thing–really simplifying your freelance life. Takes time to learn lessons and to slip up and pull yourself back up again!
Nice article! I totally agree with just about all of these tips. Especially on using the right tools. For ANY writing I do – I either use OS X’s TextEdit or a blank email from Mail. I also found that quitting my Mail and Internet Browser Apps at times that I really need to get work done greatly increases my focus and productivity. Its hard not to take notice to that little indicator that ‘I’ve got mail!’ and completely getting thrown off track.
Just to chime in as a tech guy for a second, simplifying your tools helps in a lot of ways, especially with compatibility–using a very simple tool ensures that you can save/export to whatever format your client/team needs. In the age of Office 2007/Office 2003/Open Document Format/Office Open XML and more, this kind of transferability is key.
Nice article! Thank you for the heads-up!
I applied #10 some weeks ago and I get new clients now, but as much as I did before, hehe.
Great tips!
I have been reading FreelanceSwitch since it was released, but no offense guys, sometimes you keep repeating things, like stop distraction, focus on your work, know how to say no etc. I am really liking those tips, but sometimes I feel you repeat them every other article. Sorry if I was mean
Just said what I thought.
Another great post.
hehe, yes they repeat – just like the teachers do with Math, so we learn and apply!
ill need to print this in my brain.
These are great tips! And I am a fan of google docs.
Oh man, I can so dig the “simplify your tools” rule.
I love widgets and gadgets and things that go “bleep” to remind me that I’m actually being productive and should stop.
As a freelance guy myself, I can also heartily recommend not taking on hell clients. The problem isn’t that they don’t pay, but that you’ll work 4x longer on their projects while other commissions fly out the door.
Great post!
Excellent guide posts and a memory jogger! Nicely written and essential to read about how to avoid, prevent, clutter.
Johan
WhiteRockReporter.com
Hi Leo.
Your thoughts are always well-expressed, and in this post I particularly agree with removing distractions and learning to say no. I think up till now my reluctance to say no used to arise from a sense of uncertainty. Once that is removed from the scene, it is easier to refuse work when I have enough (I won’t say plenty) of it.
no. 8 really is something i need to learn to do…
Thanks for the post, it was a great read! Great tips, but the scaling down one is tough for me, especially controlling the workday hours. I don’t have the luxury of deciding “I’ll work 6 hours today instead of the usual 16″, since my clients call me for a quick turnaround and I usually have a day or less to do the work. I do storyboards for ad agencies and I usually get 3-5 boards (sometimes 8-12) to do in 2 days or less. They hire me for my speed, and I really wish I could space these jobs out more often, but you never know when a job will pop up.
#9 is the best and most important and it feeds into #10 more times then not saying No will only result in you making more money. It can seem counterintuitive but it works!
You will either be offered more money which may turn the no into a wealthier yes or you will get something else that you can say yes too.
’10 Ways to Simplify Your Freelance Life’ helps to lead life practically. It suggests best ways to manage our day to day activities. Item 6 helps us to prioritize our work. Items 8 and 9 helps us to reduce our stress. Item 10 suggests the best way to maintain rapport with our clients. Worthy article!
This is a great article. I would like to see more of these. They are like “Proverbs” to live by for the ex-corporate, fast-paced, and over worked professional like me! It helps to deal with the shell-shock that is inevitable when leaving such an environment.
Keep it up!
If you can learn to say no to the things that you don’t need to be doing or don’t want to be doing or just shouldn’t be doing then you will free up enough time for you. Best advice I ever received was to learn to say no WITHOUT MAKING AN EXCUSE. Most of us can say no, but we feel we have to justify it. I usually say just the two words – no thanks.
Thats all true,
But you have to get confident on a good tool and stick to it. i dont think just simply using a simple tool makes things simple, when the nature of work is complicated using a complicated tool can just simply simplify your tasks. Of course that should be well thought about but sometimes you need featureful tools for complicated jobs.
Saying NO is a must.
HourDoc is another tool for Time Tracking. http://www.HourDoc.com is right treatment for time tracking of virtual assistants, has to be an easy-to-administer and affordable solution for Freelancers. They offer free application to Freelancers/companies less than 50 Users. You must Try it!
I’ve a lot of habits to kick & start.
Thanx for a great article! There are a few points I find extremely difficult to embrace being a WAHM (Work at Home Mum)…My two little distractions, having been identified, cannot be eliminated! Also, the point about checking the email only once a day…of course this depends on your business, but I find that keeping the email notification on allows me to continue working and screen the emails as they come in. If something important arrives, I can respond immediately and then get back to what I was doing. Learning to say no is a biggy! Thanx for the reminder.