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.

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I have a confession to make: I work on the weekends. It’s actually pretty rare that a weekend goes by that I don’t work at least a couple of hours. For many freelancers, working on the weekends is a no-no (although I think more of us would say that we shouldn’t work on the weekends than would say that we actually don’t work on the weekends). For several years, I’ve tried to figure out how to keep my weekends clear, but recently, I’ve been embracing it.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s nothing wrong with doing some work every weekend. There are plenty of if’s, then’s and but’s that go with this decision, of course. I know I need a healthy work-life balance as much as the next freelancer. I certainly wouldn’t recommend my approach to every other freelancer out there. But if you find yourself doing a little work on the weekends and not minding it, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Continue Reading

There’s a telling scene in the TV show Scrubs where deranged Janitor shares his business cards—a ridiculous stew of ridiculous occupations he claims to do outside his real job.

Freelancers can relate. Despite all efforts and a scary attachment to color coding, your to-do list is eating your life. When the day’s actual make-money work is finished, your other 50 jobs await: internet marketer, bookkeeper, invoice-chaser, SEO, R&D, publicist, researcher…all-out superman?

It’s a frenetic, demanding lifestyle. Where our real work fills normal (normal-ish) working hours, running our businesses can become a panicked, haphazard afterthought at the end of a long day.

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It’s a fact of freelance life that some clients just don’t really seem to understand the sort of schedule that is necessary to complete a project. Keeping to a schedule when you’re waiting for approval, content or something else from a client can take a lot of patience and a little skill. While not every client is the same — some are absolutely wonderful when it comes to scheduling — having a few tricks up your sleeve can be useful.

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Photo by frischmilch.

Recently, one of my friends asked me how I handle scheduling, getting content first and getting it on-time. I’ve been working in graphic/web design for six years professionally, primarily with non-disclosure (ND) clients.

The most important insight I gained during six years of working with different agencies is that each company has a different way of dealing with things. The most successful agencies had a few things in common.

Here’s what I learned from the big guns:

1. To schedule effectively, build a base of clients that will need on-going work.
2. To get the content up front, ask for it.
3. Place the client at the center of the universe, but with limits. Explain to them the benefits of these limits.
4. Understand that they want to be loved by you. Stay in touch!

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As referenced in this article and many more on the site, the 80/20 marketing rule should be your best friend. You need to massage your existing client base and ensure that it’s actually made up of companies that can give you business.

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