Planning Your Freelancer Daily Routine for Work-Life Balance

Whether you are stuck in a routine jam-packed with responsibilities and you can’t catch a break…. or you are ready to do something for YOU that lights your passion, freelancing can be a big opportunity to find work-life balance. But if you get started freelancing without a clear picture of what you want your life to look like, it’s easy to get sucked into working more than you would like to or filling your day with tasks that don’t fulfill you. To start planning your freelance business to support you and benefit you, we need to start with our ideal lifestyle in mind. The first step is to examine our current reality.

It’s Gut Check Time…How Does Your Daily Routine Make You Feel?

When you are wrapping up your day, how do you feel? What emotions do you go through? What signals is your body giving you? So often before my freelancing journey, I ended my day feeling empty. I was stuck trying to process leftover stress from the day and frustrated that I wasn’t able to spend my time on the things I cared about. Identify some of the adjectives that come up for you.

Now let’s shift to thinking about how you would like to feel instead. Those words for me are:

Fulfilled

Healthy

Empowered

Grounded

It can be a pretty shocking contrast sometimes between how you are feeling now to how you would like to feel. The good thing is that you are recognizing now that something isn’t right. Now you get to take action to change it.

Plan Your Ideal Schedule

Look back on the words describing how you would like to feel at the end of the day. What activities should fill your day to get you there?

To figure this out, find somewhere you can jot some notes - you’ll want to write this out somewhere that you can refer back to it regularly. You can put it in your planner, on your bulletin board, or in the notes app on your phone. We’re going to lay out a whole week with what you would do in your ideal world. I like to do a week because just one day is too variable. I can’t fit in all the things I care about in just one day! I love to do this activity in Google Calendar because I can visually lay out all my priorities right on the schedule, then take a screenshot when I’m happy with it to save to my phone.

You can break it down hour by hour, filling in your time. Start with your responsibilities. These help you see the “need to do’s” and make sure you stay realistic. Those responsibilities won’t go away, even in an ideal world, so we need to figure out how to fit things around them. Once you have the responsibilities filled in that you want or need to keep on your plate (outsourcing some of them is ok too!), then you’re ready to fill in the remaining time with things you want to do on a regular basis that fill you up. Maybe that’s making time for coffee with your husband in the morning, working out, reading a book before bed, or even just doing your makeup in peace instead of in a giant rush to get out the door.

Remember our goal is to end the day feeling those wonderful feelings we identified earlier.

Once your ideal week is complete, evaluate it. What would it take to be able to live this week out in real life? What would it take to get one step closer to it? This is also a good time to check with yourself to see if the business you are currently building is a good path to get you closer to the week you’ve designed. If it’s not, now is the time to tweak things. After all, you don’t want to build a business that keeps you just as trapped and helpless feeling.

Utilize your Dream Routine as Motivation for Growth

Building a business is hard work. There are a lot of ups and downs and it can feel like a bit of an emotional roller coaster. During this time, it’s important to very clearly understand what you’re working toward and why. I’ve found that focusing on the feelings I would feel at the end of the day as a result of getting closer to my ideal routine kept me going when I questioned myself and my direction. Knowing what schedule I was pursuing also made it easier for me to make decisions in my business. When opportunities came my way, I knew instantly if it was a good fit for me based on how it aligned with the daily routine I was planning for myself.

Identify Your Roadblocks for Progress

Now that you know what you want your life to look like, it’s time to identify what’s stopping you. A word may have already popped into your mind. It’s important to make sure the roadblock you identify is the actual thing stopping you - not just what you are feeling pressure in. For example, your road block is probably not that you don’t have any clients. It’s deeper than that. Your road block might actually be that you don’t have the courage to reach out to potential clients, that you don’t know what to say to offer them your services, or that you don’t know where to find potential clients at.

Get to the root of the issue and take the time to dissect what is really holding you back. When you’ve identified the block, it’s time to find solutions. There are plenty of options to learn about all over the internet - search your favorite platform like YouTube, Pinterest, or Instagram for ideas.

You can find support, resources, and guidance in our Facebook group Purposeful Scaling Freelancers as well! This is a free community of people committed to starting or growing their freelance business to support their ideal lifestyle, bring them purpose, and provide an income.