As freelancers and small business owners, it’s very easy for us to get stuck in a vicious cycle of working all the time. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Perhaps your business is your baby, and you find it hard to take a step back. Perhaps you simply have to work if you want to make enough money to make ends meet at the end of the month. Or maybe you struggle to say no to clients and always seem to find yourself taking on too much.

Whatever the reason, it’s something I see a lot. Although many of us started our businesses so we could do our own thing and enjoy our independence, freelancers have a tendency to find themselves tied to their desks, working non-stop.

Unfortunately, once you get into this cycle, it’s very hard to get out of it. You’re working constantly on client projects, which means you don’t have time to do any business development to change the situation. And of course, before you can finish one job, the next job has already rolled in with just as tight a deadline.

If you can identify with this and feel as though you’re in a vicious cycle, my aim with this blog post is to help you find a way to break out of it. I want to show you some small steps you can take while still working on client projects so that you can understand what you need to do to improve your business and, therefore, your life.

Believe it or not, freedom can often be found in the numbers...

How to stop working so much

I often hear people telling overworked freelancers that they just need to stop and take a step back. I’m not going to tell you to do that because I know it isn’t practical and I understand how difficult it can be.

If you’ve promised a client something by a certain date, you can’t simply not deliver because you’re feeling worn out and overworked. Besides losing the client, it could also affect your reputation and make you seem unreliable.

Instead, here are five small, actionable steps you can take while you’re working to help you find the path to freedom.

1) Track your time

If you only track your time for one thing, make sure it's the hours you’re spending on client work. Find out how much time you’re spending on each client project and discover exactly how long it’s taking you to complete each job.

This is usually an eye-opening experience because, when they start tracking their time, freelancers often see that some tasks are taking them a lot longer than they expected.

I’m linking to Toggl and RescueTime, time-tracking tools you can use to help you understand how much time you’re dedicating to each project. You can go and create a free Toggl account or sign up for a two-week trial with RescueTime straight away. It only takes a couple of minutes to register, and then you can jump right in!

2) Record how much you’re earning for each project

Once you’ve finished tracking your time for a specific client project, record how much the project was worth. How much will you invoice the end customer for?

By making a note of this information alongside your time-tracking data, you’ll immediately start to see whether or not the money you’re earning is worth the time you spent on the project.

3) Calculate your profitability

Now you have a record of the time and value of each job, you can work out your profitability per project. All you have to do is divide the amount you earned by the total number of hours it took you to complete the job, and you’ll have your profitability per hour.

Ask yourself how that number feels to you. Is your hourly profitability as much as you expected or are there some projects that don’t really reflect the time and effort you put into them?

4) Carry out a client assessment

It may be that you’re working on several projects for the same client, so you might want to work out your overall profitability per client too. Either way, at this point you can start to understand whether some clients simply aren’t worth the hassle.

In Charge with Confidence, the method I teach allows participants to calculate precisely how much they need to be earning per hour in order to cover their expenses and earn an amount they’re happy with while only working for the number of hours they want to work per week. That said, if you’re currently in a vicious cycle of working constantly, you might not have time for that right now!

Instead, see if there are any projects or clients that jump out to you as low-paying or simply not worth the hourly rate you’re earning.

5) Take action

Once you’ve completed the above steps, it’s time to take action! You’ve clearly got enough work coming through, so start by telling any drastically low-paying clients that you won’t be working with them anymore.

Similarly, if there are any clients for which your profitability is on the low end but you might find it acceptable if they paid a little more, tell them you’ll be raising your rates. If they’re willing to meet your higher fees, then that’s great. But if they aren’t, there’s no need to worry. Without these low-paying clients, you’ll free up more time to work on your business and develop your strategy so you can target those clients that will pay you more instead.

Finding higher-paying clients will eventually allow you to work less as you’ll be earning more per hour and will be able to reduce the amount you’re working with lower-paying customers.

This is how you’ll eventually start to break that vicious cycle of working all hours.

I really hope this blog post has shown you that there is light at the end of the tunnel. These initial steps are all things you can do while continuing to work on client projects. As a result, I hope they’ll feel manageable and feasible so that you can start making progress and stop working all hours. In the long term, your mind and body will certainly thank you for it!

If you feel uncertain about calculating your profitability, or as though you might benefit from a spreadsheet that does this automatically for you, you might be interested in my Custom Spreadsheet Creation offering.

I’m currently taking a limited number of bookings to design bespoke spreadsheets for individual business owners. By enabling you to gather and analyse all the data you need in one place, my personalised spreadsheets will help you become more streamlined and efficient while giving you the opportunity to learn from the data you’re collecting. All you have to do is hop on a call with me to tell me about your business, and I’ll take care of the rest!

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