Freelancing & Self Employment : How to Set Limits on How Much Time You Work - How to Make Sure That You Schedule Some Time in for Yourself and Your Family

The most common problem that freelancers face is figuring out the balance between work and the rest of life. While there are a few freelancers out there who don't work as much as they need to in order to pay their bills and improve their business, most freelancers have the opposite problem - they work ALL the time. And that's why there are a great number of freelancers who "burn out" after a short (or if they're lucky, a long) time. In order to make sure that you aren't one of those people who "used to freelance but got burned out", you need to set limits on how much you work. Then you need to stick to those limits.

But sometimes setting limits on how much you work is a lot easier to plan to do than it is to actually do. Jobs come up that don't fit into the time frame that you've worked out but that are opportunities that you just don't want to turn down. Deadlines come at you faster than expected and you need to work extra hours to meet them. The lines between work and home are blurred so you're answering work email while watching TV with the kids and you don't really consider it work. Or perhaps you don't even know where to begin because you can't tell what a realistic time frame is for setting those limits.

But you know that it's important to set limits on how much you work and you want to do it, so you're ready to get started. The first thing that you need to do is to figure out how much time you're spending on work right now. Take a week in which you maintain your normal freelance schedule but pay attention to how many hours a day you're working. Include the hours that you're doing work stuff while you do other things with your family (taking business calls during dinner, setting up your blog site while watching the kids play). You have to have a starting point to see where you're at.

Once you have this starting point, take some time to really mull over how you feel about your work situation and why that is. Do you feel like you're always working and never off? Is that because you work at all hours of the day and night without a break or is it because you're thinking about work even when you're not working? Do you feel like you're spending the right number of hours on work but not getting enough done? Identifying what you want to change is the second step in setting the limits on how much you work.

Once you know how much you already work, how much you want to be working and how productive you need to be within those hours, you can plan out a schedule for yourself. Be realistic when making this plan. It's great to say that you're going to work from 9-5 Monday through Friday, but if you pick the kids up from school at 3 every day or you're simply someone who doesn't wake up until 10, that's just not going to work. How you set the limits on your schedule doesn't have to fit anyone else's idea of what's good except your own (although you probably need to include some hours that will work within the normal working hours of your clients).

Finally, once you have that schedule in place, you need to stick to your guns about it "¦ or adjust what doesn't work. Sometimes, you'll just have been wrong about the plan when you started off and you'll need to tweak it to get things right. But when you have something that works, act as though the limits that you have set are facts, not negotiable details. Sure, there will be emergencies and temporary changes in your schedule - just like there might be with any other job that you'd take - but you should stick as closely as possible to the schedule that you've worked out. Being your own boss sometimes mean telling yourself what you need to do and doing it!

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