Self-employment gives you a lot of freedom. But even if you’re keen to ditch the nine-to-five and set your own schedule, ignoring time management completely can have negative impacts on your business and personal life.
When you work for yourself, there’s no longer a reason to clock in and out every day just for the sake of it. You can choose your hours and routine based on what’s necessary, or when you’re most productive. The challenge is that you’re also responsible for meeting deadlines, avoiding distractions and procrastination, and maintaining a work-life balance that’s sustainable.
If you’re a self-starter who enjoys organisation, then this might seem easy. But if you’re not one of those lucky people, some simple time management tips for freelancers can make a big difference in improving client relationships, delivering quality work, reduce your stress levels and stopping you from feeling overwhelmed.
It might seem counterintuitive at first, but effective time management allows you to make the most of your freedom and flexibility.
Plan and prioritise
The best method of planning and scheduling your time will depend on your personality, and the way that you work. What’s important is setting clear and definable goals and tasks, whether that’s in a simple list, or a colour-coded detailed guide to every minute of your day.
Establishing goals gives you targets to aim for, and helps you to prioritise your activity. Without them, it’s easy to feel like you’ve spent time working without achieving anything meaningful, or realising that you’ve allowed other work and distractions to take over.
You can then create a short list of tasks that need to be tackled each day towards your goals. Having a long list can easily become overwhelming, so make it an achievable amount. You can always move onto additional work if you’ve completed your list before the end of the day.
It also means you can tackle the most difficult challenges first, when you have the most energy and willpower. If you ‘Eat the Frog’ as your initial task, it builds momentum and positivity, and allows you to move onto easier or more enjoyable work when you’re starting to run out of steam.
This allows you to schedule your time more effectively, rather than just responding to client requests and deadlines as they pop up. Not only does that help to manage your workload and avoid last-minute panics, but you can also plan and ringfence leisure time and holidays. Around 78% of freelancers reported to IPSE that they wanted to take more time off, with 9% not even taking a day off in a year.
There are plenty of books and methods with various advice for planning and prioritisation, including Eat the Frog, Who Moved My Cheese, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Atomic Habits and more. You can use a pen and notebook, online apps and calendars, or whatever combination you prefer. But when you find the solution that works, you’ll be surprised at the impact it can have.
Tackle distractions
With constant emails, meeting requests, social media updates, and other distractions it can be difficult to focus on the task at hand, especially if it requires deep thought and concentration.
Working from home can be particularly challenging, especially if you don’t live alone. Setting up a home office or workspace and setting expectations with family or housemates will help a lot.
In almost all cases, you don’t need to be instantly replying to emails, so schedule time between tasks to respond to people. Turning off your social media and app notifications, and limiting time spent responding will also help to keep you focused. Switching your phone to silent mode will also avoid interruptions, although you may want to invest in a second handset for family emergencies.
You can also set office hours in your email signature, and on your website and public profiles to help keep client calls to suitable times.
Good headphones or earbuds can minimise background noise, and can provide a signal to other people not to interrupt. Work playlists can also help you focus, and know when you’re reaching a time limit for a task.
It’s important to take regular rest breaks, but try to recognise the temptation of watching one more TV episode or YouTube video if it ends up extending your lunch by an hour every day.
If you find yourself distracted by ideas for other clients or non-work tasks, jot them down in a notepad or note taking app. This will help to get them out of your mind until you’ve got the time to deal with them properly.
Track your time
For a lot of people, the idea of filling in timesheets can trigger an urge to do almost anything else instead. But when you’re self-employed, you’re tracking your time to improve your business, not to justify yourself to management.
Even a rough idea of the time you’re spending on tasks and clients can identify where you might be investing too much resource, undercharging, or that you’ve actually spent more minutes checking social media than you thought. It’s important to be honest with yourself, even if it feels slightly uncomfortable. After all, you’re the only person who is going to see the results, unless you choose to share them with a coach, mentor, or client.
If you struggle with tracking time manually, there are a lot of tools and apps available. Many of the popular invoicing tools include time tracking as a feature, which is useful if you’re billing clients on an hourly rate.
Understanding the time each task takes will help you accurately schedule and plan deadlines, and help you avoid clients overloading you with too much work for the time they’ve booked. It also means you can spot when it’s worthwhile to automate or outsource specific duties.
Use routines and rituals
You can work whenever you want, but setting a routine and establishing rituals for the start and end of the day will help you build good habits, set boundaries, and allow you to maintain your freedom and flexibility in a way that’s sustainable for the long-term.
Setting regular working hours lets you understand how much you can realistically achieve in a day or week. If you know you can only guarantee time between 10am and 2pm, for example, there’s no point in trying to schedule 12 hours of work per day. You can achieve much more by concentrating on the most important tasks and projects, and eliminating everything else.
Whether you prefer to start work as the sun comes up or enjoy staying up late into the night, establishing rituals and habits for the beginning and end of work will help you transition mentally into being focused. These can include exercise or preparing your drinks and snacks before you sit down in your home office, or having scheduled time to plan your tasks for the next day.
Use the time management techniques which work for you
Probably the most well-known time management approach is the Pomodoro Technique, which involves working in 25-minute internals followed by short five-minute breaks, and a longer rest period after you’ve completed four cycles.
Alternatives include Time Blocking, which splits each day into hour or 30-minute chucks which you then fill in with your tasks, the Flowtime Technique which has breaks when you start to lose focus on a task, or the 7-8-9 rule which allocated seven hours for sleep, eight for work, and nine for everything else.
Different techniques will work more effectively for different people depending on their personality, the tasks being tackled, and other factors. But it doesn’t cost more than some effort to try some out to see if they can help you, particularly if you’re dealing with procrastination, burnout, or simply managing your day. Even if you find that a particular method doesn’t help you, a change can be as good as a rest, and you might find yourself using some elements of it in the future.
You can also pick up good habits by studying tips and advice from other freelancers and self-employed people. Writers will often just get anything down on a page to get started and avoid staring at a blank page, and then stop in the middle of a sentence or paragraph so they can pick up again easily the next day. But those techniques can also help for other tasks.
Use automation and delegation
Time tracking and management will highlight areas of your business where you’re investing a lot of time in repetitive tasks. Or you could be spending valuable client hours on business admin that could be handled more cost-effectively by someone else.
One simple fix is to create templates for repeatable documents and tasks. IPSE members can find examples including project planning, cashflow, statements of work and more. This can save a huge amount of time over the course of months and years, allowing you to focus on client work.
You can also use automation to save yourself time and effort. In addition to invoicing tools and budgeting apps, there are a whole range of services available for the self-employed, often targeting particular industry sectors. Examples include social media schedulers, so you can prepare batches of posts and updates in one go, and post across multiple networks at once. Or automatically exporting analytics data in client reports rather than manually updating them every time.
The rise of AI has led to a boom in services using artificial intelligence to automate as much as possible when it comes to work, and life in general. The quality of their outputs will vary, so it’s important to regularly check if everything is working as expected, and to add a layer of human input and expertise where necessary.
Before automating everything, it’s worth considering how it will look from a client perspective if you’re not adding any insight to what is being generated by the software.
Another alternative is delegation. Even if you work alone, it could be a cost and time benefit to hire an accountant to look after your business accounts, or a virtual assistant to handle admin tasks. By looking at your time tracking, you can understand if the cost of outsourcing specific tasks would be covered by the hours you’ll get back.
Schedule your downtime alongside work
Whatever time management techniques you settle on using, it’s important to include downtime and rest in your schedule alongside work tasks. Not only does this prevent you from accidentally booking in so much work you can’t stop for a moment, but it also helps to ringfence and protect breaks and holidays from clients or business admin.
Setting regular breaks throughout the day will help your mental and physical wellbeing, enabling you to be productive and focused when you’re working, and able to enjoy rest and relaxation with less worries about being away from your phone or computer.
It also means it’s easier to maintain family time or hobbies, which is important for your social life. You might feel more productive skipping lunch and working straight for 12 hours, but you’ll quickly become less effective over time, and it massively increases the chances of mistakes and burnout. Sometimes a deadline crunch is unavoidable, but if it’s happening regularly, then it’s a clear sign that your time management needs some improvement.
How IPSE can help
As the UK’s only not-for-profit membership association for the self-employed, we have a whole host of support and advice to help you make more of your time.
- Find discounts on service providers via IPSE Offers.
- Streamline and optimise your business with our wide range of advice and guides.
- Get templates and documents to save you time and money creating them from scratch.
- Access the Business Hub, a resource platform with 100s of templates, guides and tools created and maintained by qualified legal and business advice experts.
Find useful tips and advice from other IPSE members, through their Stories and in the IPSE Community.
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