How Much Time Should You Spend Working Each Day?
Recently on FreelanceSwitch, I talked about attaining a good work-life balance. In that article, one of the methods for attaining a better balance was making a clear-cut decision about when you’ll work and how many hours you spend working each day, and sticking to those hours. We throw work-life balance off by creeping past those hours to get “just that bit more” done.
But how do you define the amount of time you need to spend working each day? How do we arrive at a workable figure that provides you with balance, and yet allows you to get your work done? It’s a difficult problem to solve, because we’re not in the corporate rat race. The 9-to-5 working cycle is, for us, pretty arbitrary, and part of freelancing is taking control of the way you want to do things. So do you just stick with the 9-to-5 for the sake of convenience or do you divvy up your weekly hours in a way that’s suited to you?
How many hours you work in a day, when those hours are, and the length and timing of your breaks are dependent on a variety of factors. Let’s take a look.
1. What Do You Want?
When you started freelancing, you probably had grand visions of designing your lifestyle the way you want it. For many people, these visions fall by the wayside as the rush to get our business started and fueled by clients takes priority. Even once we’ve established our business, it can be hard to get back to the original idea of it all.
What sort of lifestyle were you interested in when you decided to do this? Was it so you could work less, or so you could work through the night instead of in the blistering sunlight hours?
Whatever it was, this is where you should start.
2. Client Work
Of course, the inescapable factor is client work. How much work have you got to do in a week and how long does it take you to do it all? How can you trim the work time down? It’s not hard to trim with a few wisely implemented hacks and a good work ethic assisted by a healthy work-life balance.
You also need to determine the maximum amount of time you can devote to client work in a week; not the norm, but the peak. However, that’s something you can only figure out once you’ve gone through the rest of the list and taken all the other factors at play into consideration.
3. Marketing
How much time do you need each week to market your business? That means finding ways to reach new clients, maintaining relationships with existing clients, and perhaps returning past clients to the coop. If you’ve got the luxury, some like to dedicate one single day of the week as their “Marketing Only” day—nothing at all gets done except marketing work. It’s a smart move if you can afford to do so, since you won’t have the pressure of client work for the day weighing on you to hurry up. This is how marketing gets neglected!
4. Bookkeeping
You might hate bookkeeping, but avoiding it by failing to set aside time for it only makes matters worse. It doesn’t take long to maintain the books, especially when you set aside time each and every week to process all your income and expenses in a fancy spreadsheet.
And when tax-time comes, you kill two birds with one stone: your clients aren’t calling to scream at you because you’ve forgotten to meet a deadline in the rush to file your return, and you have a solid weekly record of expenses you can claim, instead of trying to find the two or three you remembered to keep receipts for.
How much time does it take you to manage your books?
5. General Maintenance of Affairs
We all need time to simply “get things together.” Some call it a weekly review; others call it something they should probably get around to doing. For me, maintaining my affairs means processing my inboxes, getting completed tasks out of my task management system and evaluating the incomplete ones, and of course, adding more. How much time do you need to keep the little things that creep up on you from overtaking you?
6. Relaxation and Recovery
You’ve lived and worked long enough to know how much time off you need each week to keep your sanity intact, presumably. I can still work well with one day off one week and two days off the next week, even if I have a big project deadline approaching requiring late night rushes, so I tend to alternate my weekends on this pattern. In any case, the amount of time you need to recover can add to or subtract from the pool of hours you have available to work, so figure it out and don’t underestimate it—you’ll simply burn out.
7. Family & Home
Regardless of whether or not you spend family time and relaxation time at the same time, there are chores and errands to do each week in every house. In my household, the only time we can really go grocery shopping is on a Wednesday, so I make the time to do that with my wife each week before work begins and simply tack on the time lost to the end of the day. What sort of working hour rearrangements do you need to make?
8. Other Commitments
Do you attend a ninja dojo? Study? Play in a band in your free time? All of these things matter, and while they don’t take precedence over work, they do require time—usually fixed times you can’t do anything about. Figure these other commitments into your schedule and reroute your working hours around them.
So, you’ve had a look at your week and the factors placing demands on your time, and you’ve had a look at how much time all your work-related activities take, how much time you need for home and family affairs, and how much time you need to recover from the week.
You can divide those working hours over five days a week in even chunks, or you can choose to work a four hour day one day and a twelve hour day the next; it doesn’t matter. This is the fun part—where you get to design your own working day, but now, you have all the information you need to do so responsibly.
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nice scheduling !
i think it differs from man to man.because priority of work is different for each one.as for me work matters allot.similarly people who are unable to relocate them self they can work as virtual assistant by contacting their client by siting at home via internet.as we have done the same thing.we hired virtual employees from marketraise corp, but they are not virtual assistants ,they are called as virtual workers.so, without relocating our self we are enjoying the results from virtual employees.
that’s another medium of scheduling your work.
sophia
Time management has always been the issue with me, I tend to work too much. Doing what I love is not really working, its playing.
Noon til 5pm : Work
5pm til Midnite : Family & Friend Time
Midnite til 5am : Work
5am til Noon : Sleep
It’s perfect!
I think your rhythm strongly depends on oyur clients’ work times. Sure I can work at night, but I cannot call a client an not client can call me (I wouldn’t answer the calls anyway). So I use the ordinary 9to5 weekdays and sure I also work afterwards and at weekends, but that’s not visible to customers.
I pretend to have free times and protect them. E.g. I get emails even on Saturdays at 11 p.m. but I won’t answer them until Monday morning. I don’t want my customers to expect an immediate call or mail at those rather unusual times, so that I can aktually DECIDE to have an off-day or -weekend without somebody waiting for what he usually gets.
So, I may not have much free time these days but I pretend to because I plan to really have some someday in the hopefully not too distant future.
Another great article Joel!
This is something I need to really invest the time in to figure out. I only have one client an the moment, but they provide me with tons and tons of projects, some big and some small. So I am constantly working, almost have to in order to complete them all… So setting a time limit for work each day can be very difficult! I have many days a week where I may work from 8:30am till am hours the next morning, sometimes I have to do what it takes to get the job done. I could turn away some work, but they rely on me, so that is very difficult for me to do.
But reading the above, gives me some ideas that I can try to implement in order to control it a
little better!
Matthew Duerksen
When at deadline, all day is a working day for me. Forexampla 8am to 8am.
But normal days,
Wake up 8am run shower breakfast, working starts at 9.30 am to 6.30 pm.
After 6.30 pm to midnight
it’s free time.
Great article. I especially like the first one. Since it is very easy to get lost in all the client work. It’s important to remember why you started freelancing in the first place and stick to it!
Also bookkeeping is my most hated part of freelancing but I feel so much better when I’m top of it.
I have difficulties managing my office space at home… The problem is not so much that it’s hard to allocate time to work, but rather that it’s hard to stop working. Because my office is in my house, I’m in fact always “at the office”.
Coffee shops help, but really the best I think is coworking…
Another point is that charging the appropriate price to your clients brings you quality projects and gives you the opportunity to manage your time better. It’s a win win situation.
Nice article! Thanks.
The neighborhood recreation center just did me a huge favor. Due to city budget cutbacks, they’re now closing at 6 p.m. Which means that if I want to get a good workout in at the gym, I’d best close up shop by 5 p.m. Already, I’ve been forced to become a more efficient worker, and that is very good.
10 AM to 3 PM works well for me. Occasionally I start earlier or work later if I’m taking client calls, but not too often!
I agree with you, those are good hours. I find they work for me with handling work and taking care of my daughters ages 3 and 7 months old.
How many days do you work this schedule?
I find in order to get all work done I must do it 6 days per week.
This is excellent. It’s probably the one thing all freelancers have a hard time with. It’s so hard to stay consistent and balanced, especially when your workload is particularly heavy or light. I tend to stick to fairly regular business hours (starting and ending a bit late), which makes communicating with clients easier, but also helps me stay on a good routine, exercising, eating and sleeping well.
The best life quality for freelancing is being able to say NO.
If your clients respect that and they know why you can’t… They will respect you even more. it worth more than extra money from extra work.
Quality life with friends, family and flexible free time are that why we all choose freelancing.
Sometime it’s hard to say no, but it work for me and i never lose a client.
Managing time is one of the biggest challenges the freelancers are facing.
Francis, I agree completely.
Time is indeed a big problem at times. I am still trying to organize my time. Once you have organized your time all else will flow fluently.
I have my own schedule for worked and 24 hours for me more like 12 hours because you can’t realize how fast is the time flow so quickly
This had gave me an idea how to manage my freelance time. I will try this soon.
thanks
I don’t full-time freelance any more, I’m full-time at an agency. However, with the 8.30 hours I work there, then the hours I spend writing blog articles, doing research and social networking and the odd bits of freelance at evenings and weekends – I’d say I average 11 hours a day, 6 days a week.
When I was freelancing full-time at home, there were so many distractions – thus I’d get little more than 5 hours a day done.
I love the flexibility of a home based business. I work, on average, about six hours a day. Mainly mornings, then dispersed throughout the day when I can.
I don’t have a tight schedule at this point. I like that, but I also love just delving in and working on my business for hours at a time. The best of both worlds!
Just testing…
Managing time always takes dedication for me. In just the past year or so I decided I had to set a time to go home and relax in order to be creative the next day it is a necessity. I do spend the money to rent a small studio to separate my home and work life, and that really made a huge difference in my peace of mind.