• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
FreelanceGPS

FreelanceGPS

Unstuck Your Freelance Business.

  • Newsletter
  • Resources
  • Blog

7 Tips to Crush Freelance Burnout

Tim Noetzel • March 9, 2023

Newsletters

When you first start freelancing, you’re desperate for any work you can get.

You need to eat and pay the rent. If your fledgling business doesn’t provide, you might have to get a “real job.”

But once you land a few clients, the balance shifts.

Unreasonable clients can make “simple” projects drag on for months. Late-night emails interrupt your much-needed down time. And constant messages make it difficult to focus.

If you’re not careful, freelancing can become a grind.

So in today’s newsletter, I wanted to share 7 things I’ve learned that help me avoid freelance burnout.

1. Schedule Your Emails and Slack Messages

As Diane Kelly hints, sending even one late-night response teaches clients to expect more late-night responses:

This is your freelance reminder to set boundaries with clients by not responding to emails outside of your “work hours”. If you write a reply late at night, on weekends or early AM, schedule it to send later.

— DianaKelly (@dianakelly) October 4, 2022

But the challenge with email and slack is actually more fundamental.

All immediate responses, even those sent during work hours, condition clients to expect more immediate responses. And even if a response isn’t immediate, it often cues the client to ask for yet another edit or revision.

This can make it impossible to get ahead on your task list, because new tasks soon replace the ones you just finished. If you’ve ever sent 5 emails off to clients reporting that you’ve finished their requests only to get 5 emails back with new requests, you know how pernicious this can be.

To combat this cycle, try scheduling your emails and Slack messages for anything that isn’t truly urgent.

Give yourself an hour, a day, or even more time if appropriate, and relish the feeling of having a few hours where your task list actually gets shorter.

2. Limit Distractions

As Josh Burns notes, notifications are a huge source of distractions:

Time: stop overcommitting and overworking yourself. Learn to say no when your schedule is full.

👉 Huge for me: Use the focus feature on your phone to limit notifications.

— Josh Burns Tech (@JoshBurnsTech) June 1, 2022

It’s impossible to get anything done if your devices are constantly interrupting you.

So experiment with closing chat apps like Slack, turning on Do Not Disturb, and avoiding checking email.

3. Set Contractual Boundaries

Everyone knows it’s important to set boundaries with clients.

But as Rachel Pilcher suggests, the best way to do this is by including your boundaries directly in your contract:

Tired of clients who take ages to give feedback, and then suddenly give you feedback from 50 different people? And THEN they repeat the process once you've edited everything?

Add a clause into your contract that clearly sets out your revision process *before* you start a project

— Rachael Pilcher | SaaS Copywriter (@MightyFineCopy_) October 7, 2022

In every Statement of Work or retainer agreement, make sure to include relevant limitations like:

  • Maximum number of calls per week/month
  • Deadlines for the client to deliver feedback or assets 
  • Your revision process
  • How you handle unplanned overages

4. Track Your Time

If you’re not already doing it, take Matthew Fenton’s advice and track your damn time!

One thing that’s helped me is tracking my time so that I know what a “sustainable week” is. As long as I’m not exceeding that number for weeks in a row, I’m usually burnout-free.

Also: Late-morning exercise helps to break up the screen time.#FreelanceChat

— WinningSolo (@WinningSolo) March 2, 2023

Your time is your most valuable asset, so knowing where it goes is crucial. Good time tracking can reveal all sorts of useful things about your business:

  • Which clients are most (and least) profitable
  • How much you actually get done in an average day
  • How much time gets wasted on calls and quick chats

Once you know where your time is going, you can start to experiment with streamlining the biggest offenders:

  • Spending too many hours on catch-up calls with a particular client? Try using Loom to record demos and skip the meeting.
  • Is a client particularly unprofitable? Raise your rates or replace them.

5. Be Realistic About Your Time

If you weren’t tracking your time before you started freelancing, you’ll probably be surprised that it’s possible to work a full day and still only track 6 “billable” hours.

That’s completely normal!

Think about your last full time job and remember all the time spent chatting with colleagues, eating lunch, and dealing with various everyday distractions.

As Stefan Palios notes, don’t expect yourself to actually have 100% of your time be “productive”:

Make 80% capacity your “full”

This means you’ll always have a bit of room for another super cool project, an emergency, or simply having free time

— Stefan Palios (@stefanpalios) November 9, 2021

So make sure you’re planning, and charging, appropriately.

6. Raise Your Rates

The best way to get clients who respect your boundaries is to get clients who pay you well:

A well paying freelance client will respect your boundaries and treat you as an equal partner.

A low paying freelance client will call you at 21:00 and see you as a resource only.

Take a guess which one will be harder to please.

— Tom Hirst (@tom_hirst) January 30, 2020

Seriously, don’t discount this advice.

Cheap clients will demand the world for next to nothing. High-paying clients pay on time and actually respect you as a person.

7. Build a Morning Routine

As the good folks at Unemployable note, hustle culture leads to burnout.

Exercise, meditation, and other positive habits can all help relieve stress. But I’ve found that combining them into a single morning routine can make a huge difference.

Here’s mine:

  • Start every work day with coffee and read a good book for 30 minutes (I prefer fiction, but anything not work-related is fine)
  • Meditate for 15 minutes
  • Exercise or go for a walk
  • Don’t check email or Slack before 10am

The routine is simple, but the important thing here is your focus.

By starting your day focused on yourself rather than your clients, you keep things in perspective. Your business is there to serve you, not the other way around.

When I started doing my routine, my stress levels plummeted.

Remember To Experiment

The advice above has worked well for me, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

So if you’re finding your freelance business is stressing you out, start experimenting until you find something that works for you.

. . .

How about you? What do you do to avoid freelance burnout?

sidebar

© 2021
Contact Privacy Terms