Image by RossinaBossioB.

One of the reasons many of us choose to start a freelance business is the option of largely escaping time-based payment. If a task only takes an hour, it takes an hour. People like us get paid the same whether we fill a day with it or not.

While freelancers who’ve made efforts to escape time-based pay get some pretty neat perks, there’s a trade-off: a heightened risk of over-work.

Unless they’re being given more work than they can feasibly do in the time, 20, or 40, or 70-hour per week workers don’t necessarily need to be more productive. For project-paid freelancers, the speed with which we can fly through tasks will dictate how financially successful we are.

And there’s the rub. There’s nobody telling us to go home at the end of the day, there’s no point beyond which our work is unpaid simply because it’s late in the evening, no time when the office lights start to go out, no pre-paid hours. We complete a task, we get paid, and we can complete most tasks at any time of the day or night, on any day of the week. It’s no surprise that many freelancers are overworked. The lure of “one more project, one more invoice” can be hard to resist.

The danger of overwork is compounded because project-paid freelancers have a habit of not keeping accurate tabs on the hours we work. If you enjoy what you do, working out exactly what to track can be a puzzle. Does feed reading count as play, or work-related research? What about answering emails — not all of which are strictly business related? The work-life divide is often a blur.

The problem

The only thing standing between 80 hour weeks is either a) a lack of projects or b) will-power. If you’re feeling overworked, you’ve probably got enough clients. The only variable left is self-control: the ability to say “I’ve worked enough today,” and stop. If you don’t yet have it, how do you get it?

The first question to answer is: do I feel overworked? It’s a gut feeling you get. Not necessarily all the time, but it will rear its head occasionally, maybe at the end of a day when you’ve worked from when you woke up until when you tumbled back into bed, or when you realize that you haven’t seen your best friend in a while. The next variable is how you react to that gut feeling. It’s all too easy to say: “But I need to be working this much right now, because of this, this and that.” In other words, if we overwork now, we can relax later. That ‘relaxed later’ is usually postponed ad-infinitum. Sound familiar?

One solution

This isn’t the only solution and I don’t claim that it will work for everyone. All I can say is that it worked for me, and my freelance routine probably isn’t much different to yours (liaise with clients, do work, invoice, get paid… eventually). Even if this solution won’t work right out of the box for you, it might be made workable with a few adaptations.

The process starts with a calculation: what’s the minimum amount you need to earn in a week in order to live? In other words, to pay rent, bills, buy food and have a little extra spending money left over — let’s say, $50. That’s not your ideal income, of course, but it’s the benchmark for your absolute Minimum Weekly Income (MWI) — the amount you must make to keep your affairs in order. You should only allow yourself to overwork in order to meet your MWI.

The next calculation is your cap: your Target Weekly Income (TWI). The formula is this: your average hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours you’re willing to work. Let’s say you’ve worked out your average hourly rate to be $30 and you want to spend 30 hours a week on paid tasks. Your TWI is $900. When working out the hours you want to work each week, I’d always suggest subtracting roughly 5 hours (or 2 hours for part-timers) to account for non-paid, work-related tasks (like managing accounts, answering email and liaising with clients). In this example, the person would be working 35 hours, and get paid for 30.

If you’re not sure of your average hourly rate, take the last month’s worth of jobs (or the last two-weeks worth if your memory is as bad as mine) and divide how much you got paid for each job by roughly how many hours the job took. Then add up the average hourly incomes for each job and divide by the total number of jobs over the time period. The result is a rough estimate of how much you earned per hour of work last month.

The purpose of the TWI is to establish a ceiling: the point where you stop working or accepting new jobs, even if you haven’t reached the maximum amount of hours you want to work in a week. Sometimes you will work less than full-time hours, but this is to balance out those weeks where you have to struggle and over-work just to meet your Minimum Weekly Income. Alternately, you can keep working past your TWI until your reach your work-cap for the week, but you should claim the time back as earned vacation time, or raise your TWI if you over-earn consistently.

To show you a working model, here’s my overwork safety net:

1. MWI = $300 (If I have to, I’ll exceed my work-cap to meet this minimum earn).
2. Work-cap = 10 hours (I’m finishing a communications degree and have a lot of other projects going on — I don’t want to do more than ten hours freelancing a week).
3. TWI = $500 (The weekly earn I aim for — I can stop working once I reach it even if I haven’t reached my work-cap).
4. Average hourly rate: $50 (I work fast, and I won’t accept jobs with a lower estimated hourly rate unless my MWI is in danger).

If you feel like you’re regularly exceeding your TWI while staying within your work-cap, it’s time to raise your TWI by increments.

As you can probably guess, this model does require some rough time-keeping but your career is still defined by income rather than hours. If we’re to be honest, we can’t avoid overworking unless we define what overwork means for us.

If you want to get started now and don’t mind sharing, you’re welcome to list your MWI, Work-cap, TWI and rough hourly rate in the comments section. I’d also be interested to hear your experiences with over-work. If you’ve conquered it, what was your strategy?