What I’ve Learned about Structuring My Day in Three Years of Freelancing
Going freelance over three years ago I knew my life would be vastly different from now on. But just how different? Being on your own demands enormous self-discipline, and no one could ever be as merciless a manager as yourself.
This part was at least present in my head, though as something of a vague idea. The part that didn’t even cross my mind is this: being on your own demands taking constant care of yourself. You have to learn to treat yourself very well, or you simply won’t survive.
On a practical level, it means that you have to carefully structure your daily life. It’s not a sprint, as they say, it’s a marathon, and you want to reach the finish in the best possible shape both physically and mentally.
So the first piece of advice for a freelancer who wants to make a living is the most counterintuitive one: rest first, work second. This includes:
- Getting enough sleep. You won’t get anywhere if you’re constantly sleep-deprived.
- Making breaks, at least to stretch your legs, have a glass of water, look away from your work. I use housekeeping chores for that, like loading or unloading a washing machine or a dishwasher. Also, having a dog is great in that respect (and in many other respects too, but that’s another topic), you can almost always take a break to play with it or even go for a short walk.
- Limiting your working hours. Find the way that works for you: say, you work X hours per day, or you have to finish all work by Y p.m. For one thing, it keeps you more focused, leaves less time for wandering around. For another, overworking never did any good to anyone.
- Along the same lines, make sure you have at least one day a week when you don’t work at all. At all is an important part. Good news is, you can pick any day or days of the week.
- And to continue a little further, schedule your vacations. Maybe you didn’t know that, but freelancers are allowed to have vacations. You’d be surprised but all your clients can survive this. Yes, even that one.
I know this may sound obvious or even stupid — who needs a reminder to take a day off? And yet I personally have made all those mistakes, and more. And yet I see my fellow freelancers making them over and over again. And yet you too will be tempted to work extra hours today for an ‘urgent’ project and do ‘just this one little thing’ on Sunday. Don’t.
As for structuring your (limited) working hours, again I wish to focus on something seemingly unrelated. Here we go: know your cycles. There is nothing esoteric about it, it’s purely pragmatic. Being a morning person or a night owl defines which kinds of work you do first and last.
Assuming you’re a ‘creative’ freelancer, maybe also a copywriter, it’s safe to say that your creative process is the most important job you do, meaning it’s the most valuable part of your actual work that’s logically enough consuming the most of your resources — not necessarily your time but your energy, creativity, brain work and such. If you’re a morning person, this is what the first task of your day should be. Write for a certain amount of time or a certain amount of words. If you prefer a result-oriented approach (although most coaches will advise against it), complete a certain amount of writing-related tasks. Only after completing this you can switch to other types of work: phone calls, emails, meetings, research, editing, etc. An efficient idea would be to divide all of these into blocks of similar tasks and move through your day from one block to another, from the most important/creative/younameit to the least.
If you’re a night owl, like yours truly, the order will be reversed. We night people need time for our brain/creativity/ability to warm up. So in my case, the first block is usually communications (from checking messengers and social media to emails), then some routine tasks like maybe posting something or researching, maybe some administrative work, and only by night I get to writing and translating tasks.
By the way, morning and night are very relative notions. It doesn’t actually matter what time do you wake up and when you are going to bed. The critical difference is the ability to concentrate and, well, create right after waking up. By this classification, if you wake up at noon and can start writing right away, you’re a morning person; and if you wake up at six a.m. and need at least two hours to come to your senses and start thinking, you’re a night owl.
All the specifics are very personal, and you need a process of trial and error to build the system that works personally for you. For example, experimenting with the famous Pomodoro technique, I realized that the standard 25 minutes period works OK-ish, but actually, my cycle is 45–50 min of concentration and then a break or a change of activity. Or, for instance, I found out that after completing the last block, that of writing, I need some kind of a slowdown path before switching off completely.
Take care of yourself and experiment, and may the Force be with you.
