A set schedule = freelancing freedom
A consistent schedule is not just good for productivity — it’s good for your sanity, too.
When I first became a freelancer, it felt like I broke free from a cage. After years of working on my corporate job’s schedule, I wanted nothing more than just do what I wanted, when I wanted to do it.
If the sun was shining, it was time to hit the hiking trails. If it rained, more often than not I felt like having a cozy day of curling up and reading a book. Maybe you can relate?
But all this freedom meant that I was often scrambling to get to the things I had to do, be it client work, some basic marketing to get my name out there, or even grocery shopping.
Because I kept pretending like the laws of physics didn’t apply to me — that is, I could stretch time however it suited me — I often ended up making a mess of my day, double-booking myself, not giving myself enough margin between client calls, working 14-hour days to meet a looming deadline, and so on.
After about a year of behaving like a rebellious teenager and living life supposedly on my own terms, I found myself more stressed out and more burned out than I ever felt in my corporate job.
I was feeling very unhappy with my freelancing, but didn’t want to go back to working for The Man. So, I looked around for inspiration.
I started noticing that some of my freelance friends seemed to be very productive and very happy at the same time!
When I asked them how they did it, every single one of them told me that they went back to a more-or-less rigid schedule. Work wasn’t necessarily performed from 9 to 5, but each had set specific hours during the week for client work and other hours to work on the business side of freelancing. Some have further split the business-side hours into dedicated marketing and back-office hours.
Paradoxically, this rigid schedule gave them more freedom. They knew that they’ll get their work done and that made them not think about work or their business during their personal time.
At first, I resisted this simple recipe for achieving freelancing nirvana because I thought that my work was too variable. One week, I had 45-hours’ worth of client work while the next week I only had 11.
But then I started to understand that that’s actually not true. Most of my client projects come with long enough deadlines that I could even out my pace and meet all deadlines by working approximately 20 hours a week. The reason I wasn’t able to do that before was that I was waiting until the last moment to get that adrenaline rush to carry me through.
This is when I decided to build a schedule for myself and to organize my days in a way that didn’t shortchange either my clients or my own desire to have daylight time free for hiking and horseback riding.
It took a few iterations, but I finally was able to create the perfect schedule for me — and I’m both happier and more productive for it.
Using ClickUp to organize my time and visualize all the tasks on my to-do list has helped tremendously and saves me hours each week compared to if I had stuck to any kind of pen-and-paper organizing system. But regardless of the system you use, if you’re finding that you’re stressed and unhappy in your freelancing, maybe it’s time to give a proper schedule another look.
