Where to Spend Your Time in Your Freelance Business
Getting started freelancing might feel overwhelming in the beginning. How do you find time to get clients, schedule meetings, deliver your services, send invoices, and still live your life? First, take a moment to check out this post on time management hacks so you can make the most of the time you have. Then, let’s talk about the important buckets you need to categorize your tasks into so you spend your limited time appropriately to grow your business, serve your clients, and make a good income doing it.
Where Should You Spend Your Time as a Freelancer?
Your tasks need to be organized into five buckets for your freelancing business.
Communication
Billing
Delivery of Services
Prospecting and Marketing
Growth
Leaving any one of these out means your business is missing a very important piece of the foundation. You may experience success for a time, but failing to allocate the appropriate time to any of these categories will cause some major problems in your business down the road. So how much time should be spent on each category?
How Much Time Should You Spend on Each Freelance Business Task?
Communication: 20%
Communication is key to growing and maintaining client relationships. Tasks that fall into this category are:
Scheduling meetings
Sending emails
Phone conversations and texts
Traveling to and attending meetings
Reporting progress
You may want to establish some boundaries around this category so it doesn’t eat up too much of your time. While you absolutely want to communicate with your clients well, you also want to do so efficiently. So if in-person meetings don’t work for you, or you would rather not monitor texts and Instagram messages for client communication, communicate that with your client up front. If you can, schedule a regular reoccurring meeting with them so you know it works for both your schedules and you can depend on it to knock out the bulk of your communication. Don’t forget to dedicate time to reporting progress in this category. This is often overlooked, but is one of the biggest factors to client satisfaction - sometimes even more so than the work you do!
Billing: 10%
If you don’t make time to send invoices, you aren’t going to get paid. And we both know that is an important part of business! It may seem obvious, but so many people get into freelancing because they love what they do and are really good at what they do, so they want to focus all their time on the delivery of their service, then whoops- they haven’t remembered to send a bill for three months! Set up a regular reminder on your calendar to send invoices to your clients and to check that those invoices are being paid in a timely manner. If they aren’t, follow up and stop work on the project until payment has been made. You can use an invoicing software (this free one is my favorite!) to make this easier on yourself and to create templates that auto-send for invoices that are the same every time you send them.
Delivery of Services: 40%
This is where we all love to be - doing that thing we love to do and are just so darn good at! You want to spend the bulk of your business time here, but it’s important to not let it take over your business. The other four categories are every bit as important, and sometimes more so, to the long-term success of your business.
Prospecting and Marketing: 10-30%
No matter how you are doing outreach to potential customers and clients, whether that’s value-based marketing, cold calling, networking in groups, or promoting yourself on social media, it’s important to focus here first. After all, if you can’t find clients, then none of the other categories in your business ever get to happen. This category is set up as a range of 10-30%. But in reality, in the beginning of your business, it could be as much as 100% of your time until you get your first client. Even after you have a full client roster, you want to keep a portion of your time active in this area so you always have new potential leads coming in. Even if you don’t have any desire to grow your business, freelancing clients don’t always last forever. If one of your clients cancels or chooses not to renew their service with you, you don’t want to be stuck scrambling to replace that income. Consistent marketing allows you to have a community of warm leads to sell to anytime you are ready to take on more clients.
Growth: 0-20%
Yes, this really is 0-20% of your time. A lot of freelancers want to focus 100% of their time here in the beginning, but that just isn’t necessary in most cases. The fact is, you don’t need to learn any new skills to get started freelancing. You already have skills you can capitalize on. When you have income coming in and clients on your roster, that’s when you should start to focus on making sure your skills are growing, so you can continue to serve them better. This can also include spending time thinking about the big picture of your business and identifying new directions you want to go and how you want your business to grow and change over time.
How Can You Be Efficient with Your Side Hustle Time or as a Working Parent?
So now that we know where you need to focus your time and what tasks fall into those categories, how can you make that happen with the limited time you have?
First, think about days and times in your regular week where these tasks naturally fit in. For example, if you like to get up early, this might be a great time to focus on delivery of services when you have lots of creativity and energy. For me, I always liked to do my billing on Saturday mornings because it was a low-input task that I could do while also getting my kids breakfast and hanging out with them. My favorite time to do some delivery of services was a power hour over my lunch break when I was already in work mode and could knock out a bunch of tasks. The goal here is to make your freelancing tasks fit around your life so you are set up for a sustainable business that works for you, instead of burning you out and causing you stress.
The good news is that you will get faster at all of these tasks over time. This means your business will have room to grow and take on more clients because you will continue to become more efficient. Some other things you can do to help you be efficient is to set up templates for everything you do from emails to invoices to proposals. You only want to do something from scratch one time. Every other time should just be a tweak of the original.
A few of my favorite ways to stay organized are:
Reoccurring tasks on Google calendar so I can see what I need to do and when, as well as if I have the capacity to take on more clients or not
Google Keep - an app that lets you create sticky note style notes on your phone or computer and color code them. I love to keep track of client info and updates this way
Gmail extensions - use these to create email templates that you can update or modify instead of typing from scratch. There are tons of options - take a browse and see what would be helpful to you.
A time tracking app - use this to monitor how you spend your time. This helps you know if you are spending too much time in one category of your business and also helps you see which client tasks are taking more or less time, so you can find ways to be more efficient, or better understand how you should bill for your services.
AirTable - This is a very diverse software (with a free version!) you can use to store client information, use to have clients review content, and even create reports.
Canva - I use this for marketing graphics and proposal templates. If you need help with your proposals, grab my free proposal template resource!
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.
