Home life and work life can easily interfere with one another when working as a freelancer. By keeping the two separate, you can work more productively and enjoy your free time more. Here are just several ways to enjoy work life balance when, like me, working as a freelancer.
Work Life Balance Tip 1: Have a Dedicated Work Space
Having a space in your home dedicated solely for work can help you to switch to work mode (and off again). It’s important that your designated workspace is somewhere free of distractions – working from your living room whilst other family members watch TV is not ideal. If you don’t have an individual room to transform into a home office, try to at least designate a corner of a room as your office, For instance, you could consider buying some office furniture and setting up a desk in the corner of your bedroom. Alternatively, you may be able to convert unused space into an office such as an unused loft.
Work Life Balance Tip 2: Work Away From The Home
I remote work a lot. This can help you to get away from the distractions of home and give you that sense of having a separate workplace. Libraries and coffee bars are popular free places to work from. You can also try renting a desk in a co-working space to see if this helps you get into a work mindset. I run a free coworking group in Thirsk aimed at helping reduce freelancer’s isolation and boosting work life balance.
Work Life Balance Tip 3: Keep a Work Schedule
Freelancing offers the benefit of being able to work flexibly, but too much flexibility can have an impact on your ability to work. Try to keep set work hours each day if you can. Not only will you find it easier to concentrate on your work, but you can then set dedicated and uninterrupted times for doing things with other people. I’m very strict on my working and non-working times.
Work Life Balance Tip 4: Use Separate Phones
If clients contact you by phone, it could be worth considering buying a separate phone for work use. You can then turn this work phone off in your free time so that you don’t have to deal with work calls and texts. Similarly, you could turn your personal phone off during work hours – whilst you may still want to keep a few emergency personal numbers on this phone, it could allow you to distance yourself from personal social media notifications and unimportant texts that could serve as a distraction when you’re working.
Work Life Balance Tip 5: Use Separate Email Addresses
It could also be worth setting up separate email addresses. This can allow you to only receive business emails when logged into your work email and only personal emails when logged into your personal email. If you’ve got too separate phones, you may also be able to log each one into a separate account. This is more about avoiding distractions which means you should get your allotted work done in work hours and not run over into “home” time.
If you have any other work life balance top tips for freelancers feel free to comment below.
