Freelancing is often seen as a dream job since it allows you to work from home on your own schedule and even choose your own clients. Anyone who has tried freelancing knows that, while these perks are great, this is far from the whole truth.
Clients can interrupt your work, schedule meetings during family time or when your friends wanna party, and make having a work-life balance nearly impossible. You typically over-work yourself just to make clients happy and meet their strict deadlines.
You signed up to work as a freelancer, but you didn’t plan on spending so much of your time writing invoices, offering customer support, and marketing yourself. Sometimes you end up waiting weeks or even months just to be paid, while constantly having to remind the client what you are owed.
With freelancing comes a lot of stress that you wouldn’t normally have at a typical 9-5 job. But it doesn’t have to be that way; let me show you how.
Selectively Choose Your Projects
Freelancers often go through a feast and famine cycle, with an influx of projects at certain times and none at others. Freelancers looking to earn as much money as they can might take on as many projects as possible, regardless of how well they fit with your skill set.
Taking on projects you’re not particularly well versed in will only upset clients and decrease your efficiency. Is the extra 100 dollars really worth the massive headache and sleepless nights trying to hit that deadline?
Saving Money
Saving money isn’t the most glamorous advice, but it will come in handy during times of famine. Putting aside some extra money each week during times when projects are plentiful will save you a lot of headache and stress when the stream of clients runs dry.
Figure out how much money you need to live on each month and put money aside until you reach that amount. Once you save up enough for one month, work towards creating a 3–6-month emergency fund. And when you reach that goal? That doesn’t mean you should stop saving. Now you can invest that excess money in an index fund or other stocks of your choice to further your financial independence.
Find Your Most Productive Time
Finding out what time of day you work most productively can save you a lot of headaches. Do you work better early in the morning? Or are you more productive after you sleep in till 11am? If you are like me, maybe you ‘re better starting after 4pm and working into the night?
Do some experimenting…find out what time of day you work most productively and stick to that schedule. This will help add some consistency to your routine and allow you to use your time more effectively. No more aimlessly staring at your screen, wondering why you can’t seem to get any work done!
Create an Office Space
Working from home is often regarded as the holy grail of work environments, but it comes with its own slew of problems. Working from the comfort of your own home or apartment makes it nearly impossible to keep your work and personal lives separate.
Creating a separate office space from where you spend the majority of your leisure time can help you work more effectively by establishing much-needed boundaries that allow you to leave work at work.
Exercises Regularly
You might not think that exercise is related to your stress levels as a freelancer. However, exercise is known to release feel-good chemicals and is beneficial to your health. Exercising in the morning can improve your mood and energy levels throughout the day, allowing you to work more effectively. Making exercise a part of your morning routine will undoubtedly help to reduce stress and improve your overall quality of life.
Say No
Learning to say no to clients can be extremely beneficial in relieving freelancer stress. Most freelancers feel obligated to accept a project from a new or previous client, regardless of current circumstances.
However, you can learn to say no to clients and politely explain that you currently have too much work on your plate. Clients will actually value you more if you say no to a project and explain why, rather than accept a project and then miss deadlines or submit sloppy work.
Join a freelancer co-op
Freelancer cooperatives can be an amazing way to eliminate the stress involved with freelancing. Freelancer cooperatives provide account managers to handle all client support and invoicing needs. Through their marketing team, they can also provide you with new clients.If you’ve ever felt lonely while freelancing, freelancer cooperatives sometimes offer co-working spaces where you can chat and work with other freelancers. These collegial social interactions can do wonders for lowering your stress level. And, if you find it difficult to create that work-life balance while working from home, these co-working spaces can be ideal.
Sometimes people confuse agencies and freelancer cooperatives. A freelancer co-op is a group of freelancers who collaborate under one roof, as opposed to an agency, which takes up to 50% of your profits.
Freelancer cooperatives only charge a project management fee that is added to client invoices, as well as a small freelancer fee to cover marketing and billing expenses. These costs are often voided by the increase in productivity, which allows freelancers to take on more work and clients to get their work done faster.
Agency716 is currently accepting freelancers for their cooperative, and for a limited time, freelancers will pay absolutely no fees. If you want to eliminate stress from your life and finally achieve the perfect work-life balance, come join our freelancer cooperative now.