From Forbes, Larry Alton shares 7 recommendations for improving your work/life balance as a freelancer. Larry writes:
1. Work with other professionals
Just because you’re on your own, that doesn’t mean you’re truly on your own. Thanks to the popularity of the gig economy, there are in fact more freelancers and independent contractors operating in the job market than ever! A pessimist might regard this as an increase in competition that makes it harder to find work. But for the optimist, it represents many more opportunities: You may contact other professionals to help you manage your workload if it gets too big, or use them to find new opportunities when your well runs dry. Go ahead and network with other free agents, as well as bigger organizations, the way a landlord might work with other landlords or a property management firm to manage his or her life and work more efficiently and productively.
2. Be willing to fire unruly clients
When you’re on your own, all your clients feel important, and they should, since they’re giving you money for a product or service. You owe it to your clients to give them the best experience possible. That’s what will keep them coming back, and (you hope) referring other potential clients to you. However, not all of them are created equal. Some will be relatively easy to work with, some will have a few quirks you’ll have to handle, and a few will turn out to be nightmares. You need to learn to recognize the nightmare clients and get rid of them before they do too much damage.
3. Draw a line between personal and professional
When you’re jumping from gig to gig and client to client — working from home and pulling strange hours — it’s easy for the lines between personal and professional to blur. You no longer have the 9-to-5 or the dedicated office space to help you distinguish clearly between work time and home time; everything’s just general time now. You can strive for a healthier work-life balance by trying to re-draw the line, or draw it more boldly where it gets blurry. Set up a home office, set strict hours, and don’t let anything interrupt your personal time. (More on this later.)
Read the full story at 7 Strategies For A Better Work-Life Balance In The Freelance Economy – Forbes
