Work/Life Balance For Freelancers

I don’t know about you, but I’m always full of hope and optimism at the end of the year.

This is going to be the year I finally make going to the gym a routine.

This is the year I finally write that new book.

This is the year I finally run my freelancing business like a proper business.

It’s all good and well to have lofty goals—after all, goals make the mundane day-to-day tasks more palatable.

But you can’t check “wrote a new book” off a to-do list. Rather, writing a book involves planning, outlining, index cards, sticky notes, writing drafts, getting drafts edited, rewriting drafts because the first version really sucked, and so on.

The same thing goes with your business.

If you want to make $100,000 next year and you made $50,000 this year, you’re going to need to reliably charge more (by offering a better product) or sell twice as many projects, build a solid foundation of clients on retainer, create and launch your own products, or any number of other options at your disposal.

But it can be a bit overwhelming.

What should you be doing next?

What’s the #1 thing you should be focused on right now?

I can’t answer that for you.

But I can give you a few recommendations on where to start. “Freelance lifehacks,” if you will 🙂

My favorite talk from this year’s DYFConf North America wasn’t about some new, highly profitable marketing strategy or automation technique.

It was “a cautionary tale about the awesomeness of being a superhero.”

My friend, Dr. Sherry Walling, spoke about some of the risks that affect us as freelancers and independent business owners.

Anxiety. Isolation. Failure.

These affect us all — though some of us do a better job at hiding it than others.

After Sherry gave her presentation, I knew I needed to share her talk with the DYF community and the world at large once the video was ready.

Below are my notes, and above you’ll find the full, unedited video.

Please take 45 minutes out of your schedule to really focus and take in Sherry’s talk. Your life, your business, and the lives of the people you love and care about could depend on it.

You know it’s important to save money.

For retirement. For unexpected big expenses. And — especially as a freelancer — if you end up in a prolonged dry spell with no client work.

Even though we all know that we should be saving, few people do. In fact, 62% of Americans have no money on hand for emergencies. It’s bad. Really bad.

And until pretty recently, I was one of those 62% of Americans.

I took the approach that I think a lot of people in our industry do: My skill-set is in demand. I won’t want for money anytime soon. I can budget against the money I’m going to make.

Have you ever opened up your calculator app and started plugging in numbers from invoice payments that you knew were coming?

Have you summed up a bunch of future invoices you’d be sending and thought, “I’m fine.”

Have you budgeted using money you actually don’t have yet?

I have. Way too many times to count.

And it’s bit me… hard.

Sooner or later, we all want to give up.

A few of us act on it and go back to the relative comfort of a “show up and get paid” full-time job, or in more extreme examples give up technology and computers altogether and get into carpentry or even farming (no joke — I know a few freelancers-turned-farmers.)

It’s no secret that burning out can lead to getting little done, staring mindlessly at your screen, and ultimately questioning your decision to become a freelancer.

But behind the symptom of burnout, typically there are a few root causes. Today I’d like to outline a few of the causes that I’ve identified in my own life, and share some of the ways I’ve overcome them.

I want to talk today about fear.

A few weeks ago, I began planning how I’d release my newest product, the Freelancers Guild. And even though I’ve sold millions of dollars of consulting services and hundreds of thousands of products, I was still gripped by the fact that I’d be asking people to pay me money… and this scared me.

You might think that I’d now be over that fear, that selling would come second nature to me. Well, I’m not. Like many of you, I still allow myself to be visited from time to time by doubt.