Now that you have your coming soon page up and are ready to begin getting down to business as a freelancer you have to think about how you are going to go about doing business. This is a very complicated part of being a freelancer and one of the most important parts of your job. I am not talking about how much you will charge, what your design niche will be, or even what your home page will look like. No, I am talking about planning your day. No matter how good you are at designing you will fail as a freelancer if you don’t have the proper day planning. So what is essential to your planning?

Getting Started

So, because you are a freelancer you don’t have to get up early now right? Well, yes and no. You do set your own hours, but your hours are also essentially set by your clients. You could wake up and start whenever you want, but I guarantee that you will lose clients that way. If you are set on waking up later than normal you need to set up the dates you do that for days that you don’t have meetings.
No matter what time you decide to wake up, however, you need to give yourself time to wake up and get ready for the day. I have seen too many freelancers fall apart because they are trying to just wake up and go to meetings or get started designing. This will get you nowhere and will probably end up pushing you on a downslide.
If you have a family then you need to spend what time you can with them. I know better than anyone the strain that running a business can take on your family life and believe me it is not worth it. If you can plan out your day correctly there will be no strain and it will be just like if you were working at a design firm or a regular nine to five job.

Check Your E-Mail and Voicemail

Your email is the most important part of your business; therefore, you should always check your email before you go to any meetings or start any design work. Your emails will tell you whether you have a cancellation, a new client you need to meet with, critique to think about during the day. Ninety percent of your clients that leave you a voicemail will have sent you an email first and were just calling to say they left you an email (redundant right?).
You can, hopefully, multi-task so check your voicemails at the same time that you are checking your email. If you get a voicemail from your client talking about an email then find that email. You may be required to call back that client and when is better to do that then right after listening to their voicemail? Any other time during the day is better than to stop what you are doing to call back a client. Take notes and call the client back after you are finished checking the rest of your emails.
Respond to all applicable emails in the same fashion that you will voicemails. Take notes, finish what you are doing first, and then respond to those emails. You will need to prioritize your emails and how you want to respond to those. Depending on your normal amount of voicemails and emails will depend on how much time you need to set aside for this. I set out one hour and thirty minutes a day to check my emails, respond to the emails, and have conversations with clients.

Meetings

Meetings are another important aspect of being a designer, but it is not the most important part. The most important part of being a designer is your design work. Meetings are what bring your design work to your clients, but too many meetings and not enough design work means that you will soon be overloaded with work that is not getting done.
If meetings are essential to getting new work and designing is essential to getting the new work done then how do you balance those two out? You need to set up two or three days a week where you do nothing but meetings. I would not recommend setting them up to be two or three days in a row, rather space them out during the week. Why? Because half of those meetings will be with clients wanting progress reports and if you have no time in between to design how will you manage that? I know it sounds like common sense but many businesses, even today, will set up all their meetings back to back and end up regretting that and cancelling with you anyway.
On the days that you do meetings do not set aside any time for designing. Your mind needs to be focused on your meetings when you are having meetings and on your design when you are designing. If you want to do some design work at the end of the day then that is fine, but don’t do it in between meetings. If a client cancels and suddenly you are left with an hour or two of open time a day and want to fill it with designing, go ahead, but don’t work on any of your projects. If you have an extra couple of hours a day use that time to work on your own thing, design some things for fun, release some freebies, or get your name out there.

Design Work

Now we start on design work. Designing is the most important part of being a freelancer so you should set aside two or three days dedicated just to working on your design projects. This way you can focus on your design work without having to worry about what you will talk about with the new clients, or whether the client you are meeting in a few hours will like your design. If your mind is not focused on your design you will start lacking in your design work.
If you don’t have enough design work to necessitate the need for more than one day of design work then set aside one day for design work until it is necessary to commit another day or two more days. When it does become a necessity to set aside another day then you must do it right away. If you don’t start designating more time for designing you will fall into the trap of trying to fit in too much work in too little time.

Time Fillers

I know that every designer needs a break from their work. When I finish a design I know that I need to step back for about half an hour and just relax, get my mind off of things, and Twee…..I mean relax. No really though Social Networking is still work but it is fun work, well sometimes. When you need a break from work let your social network be the first steps towards relaxing. Keep all your followers, fans, dribbblets, and what not in the loop with your work. Now sit back and relax and let your creative juices simmer down before bringing them back to a boil.

Conclusion

Planning your day is, as you can see, the most important part of being a freelancer. It will help you to maintain a steady work ethic, keep your designs to your standards, and stop you from overworking yourself. While working 19-20 hours days may seem like a quicker way to make more money and grow faster it will actually have the opposite effect. It will be detrimental to your business and, more than likely, be detrimental to your health. Please, take what I have written to heart and apply it to your own style of work.