Time Management for Freelancers

Once you’ve landed your first clients and officially embarked on your freelance journey, it’s time to make sure that your schedule works in your favor. Time management is critical to your success as a freelancer. Not managing your time effectively can lead to delivering projects late or incomplete, which leads to strained client relationships and less referral potential. Poor freelancer time management also goes hand in hand with work/life imbalance, which leads to deteriorating mental health and burnout—which then cycles back to poor job performance. 

The good news is: As your own boss, your time is under your control, and you have the power to break out of unhealthy or ineffective time management habits. Establishing healthy freelance time management habits from the start can help set you up for success down the road. From organizing an effective daily routine to setting expectations with clients, learn how you can manage your time as a freelancer and prevent burnout. 

Organizing an effective routine

One of the keys to finding balance as a freelancer doesn’t lie in calendars, prioritized to-do lists, or productivity hacks. All of those time management tools are indeed necessary for keeping track of everything on your plate and holding yourself accountable. But the real key to long-term freelance time management success lies in the way you organize each day and week. 

Identify and categorize your tasks

Becoming a freelancer means wearing a lot of hats, so it’s understandable that many freelancers struggle to find enough time in the day to do everything they need—or want—to do. The trick is to start by identifying the broad categories of tasks or activities in your life, then shaping your daily and weekly schedules around them. Those categories should include your freelance work (e.g., client work, marketing, administrative tasks, client and networking calls), personal life (e.g., chores, personal care, family responsibilities, socializing, relaxation, hobbies), and your day job (if applicable). 

Map out your daily blueprint

Once you’ve identified those core components of your days, build out a daily blueprint that can accommodate all of the broad categories on your list and the time commitments that each one requires to help you achieve a balanced life. This shouldn’t be a granular schedule that lists specific items on your to-do list. Instead, it’s a holistic approach to each day that structures blocks of time for specific categories and schedules them at your own most optimized times of day. 

Let’s take a closer look at this approach in action: Say you’re a single, full-time freelancer who’s also a runner with an active social life. You’re an early bird who knows from past experimentation that you usually get your best work done in the morning and focus better on client-facing work later in the day.

In this hypothetical, your daily routine blueprint might look like this: 

• Early morning: Personal care and running

• Morning: Client work

• Mid-day: Personal break

• Afternoon: Marketing and administrative tasks

• Late afternoon: Client and networking calls

• Early evening: Personal chores

• Evening: Socializing and relaxation

Once you have that blueprint, you can get more granular each day with what specific items from your to-do list need to fit into each categorized time block. From there, you might expand that blueprint into a variant for each day of the week. For example, maybe on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays you run before starting work in the morning, while on other days you meditate instead. Or maybe you know that you need more time for client work throughout the week and less time for calls, so you switch up your late afternoon tasks every other day. 

This process can help you identify what you value most in your work and personal life, as well as when you feel most productive and present in each activity throughout your day and week. It also helps you minimize frequent task-switching, improving your focus during each block of time in your day. 

Find freedom and security in routine

The point of this exercise isn’t to create routines that feel rigid and limiting—the point is to find freedom and security in the routines that work best for your unique lifestyle. By creating boundaries and balance around how you utilize your time, it’s more likely you’ll be able to stay present and mitigate burnout. Maintaining a routine can help you build mental muscle memory habits that train you to focus more fully on the task category you’ve allotted time for, and less time worrying you should be doing something else at that time. That makes a big difference in not only how you focus on work, but how fully you can experience your personal life.

Respecting your own time and energy

Even with the most thoughtfully planned routine, life and work are unpredictable, so it’s inevitable that there will be times when your schedule gets shaken up and burnout creeps in. The way you navigate times like those determine how effectively you can beat burnout and get yourself back on track. 

It starts with respecting your own time and energy—exactly as it is in the moment, without judgment or excuses. Ask yourself a few key questions: 

• Have you been taking on more work or personal responsibilities than you can realistically stay on top of? Consider what things you can feasibly say no to, and practice saying no more often to the projects and plans that don’t serve you. 

• When was the last time you scheduled time off? Even if it means finances might be a little tight, take off for a day, weekend, or even a full week or more. Time off to recharge is beneficial for your overall health and energy, which means you’ll be able to show up more fully for yourself and your clients when you return. 

• Did you schedule time off, but then end up working anyway because you had to put out some fires that seemed urgent? Next time, schedule time off and stick to it—no matter what. If you don’t respect your own time, it’s less likely your clients will either. Always communicate to clients when you’ll be taking extended time off so you set expectations, and then fully immerse yourself in time away from all aspects of freelance work. 

If you’re burning out because you’re working part-time on top of your day job, it can help to set a goal for when you’re either going to stop freelancing, or quit your day job and freelance full-time. Knowing there’s an end in sight to juggling both jobs can help you manage your mental health and identify opportunities for balance in the meantime. 

Setting expectations with clients

As you work on organizing and respecting your own time, it’s just as important to set expectations with clients about your availability and bandwidth. There are two main areas where it’s important to advocate for yourself when it comes to client expectations: client project scope and your freelance availability. 

Navigating out-of-scope client requests

Occasionally, you might get clients who request more from you than what was outlined in your contract’s project scope. For example, if you’re a graphic designer who agreed to deliver three logo variations, and the client requests two additional variations, it’s time to advocate for the respect of your time, point to the contracted agreement, and—depending on your bandwidth—either politely decline or request an additional agreement and compensation for those additional deliverables. 

Moving forward beyond the agreed-upon scope without additional compensation can lead to resentment, which affects your relationship with that client. Plus, if you suddenly have more work on your roster than you’d planned for, that can imbalance your schedule, affect your work with other clients, and lead to burnout. 

Managing availability expectations

The simplest way to make sure clients know when you’re available is to be up front about your working hours at the outset of your client relationship. Remember that you control your own schedule, so if you can successfully tackle all of your freelancing by only working from 8am-4pm Monday-Wednesday, just be clear about that to clients in your initial conversations. You could even work into the contract that you’re only reachable via email at certain times. If you train clients to not to expect a response from you outside of those days and hours, then you won’t need to feel pressured to break your own boundaries around work/life balance. 

Another simple way to manage your time with clients is to set expectations about when they can schedule calls with you. For example, say you’re that freelancer who only takes calls in the afternoon. You could use an online scheduler like Acuity Scheduling to set your availability for meetings to only the hours that work for you—say, 1-4pm Monday-Wednesday—and the scheduling app will show exclusively those time slots to clients as scheduling options. That way, you won’t need to worry about clients unexpectedly scheduling calls with you during your optimal deep focus time or personal life. 

Using an online scheduler like this also helps to normalize the online scheduling experience for clients. Managing client calls gets a lot easier when clients get used to only scheduling calls with you through your online scheduler, either via a link you directly send to them or through the scheduler embedded in your freelance website. With Acuity Scheduling, you can even set up buffers between calls during your available hours, so you don’t end up with a long block of back-to-back calls. That feature lets you automatically pad the time between calls by 5-10 minutes, so you have time to stretch, hydrate, and prepare for the next call.

Building a schedule that works for you and keeps burnout at bay is possible with a combination of all of these freelance time management techniques. If you’re new to freelancing, check out our complete guide on how to become a freelancer.