Time Management For Freelancers | Back To Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 275

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, hi. Hey, hello, welcome, so glad to have you here. This podcast is for you. If you are a creative freelancer, you offer freelance services, and you want to earn more money from your creative skills without selling your soul, that sounds like you, you are in the right spot.

For my returning listeners, we are going back to the basics again.

This is a series I did back on episode like 250 to like 260, something like that.

And it was kind of a limited run of just going back to the things at the beginning of our careers. A lot of times we just either miss completely for our advanced people, they miss some of the things that they should have known because they're self-taught, and just sometimes we don't know the basics of certain things. And there's a whole great series, again, somewhere between 250 and 260 Go back and look there for those past Back to Basics episodes. Awesome to review that if you are experienced or a beginner. And then for our beginning listeners, this stuff is great to know because you have to know this stuff in order to be, I wouldn't say you have to know this stuff. It is in your best interest to know this stuff if you want to become a successful freelancer. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about time management basics, which sounds really mundane and plain, but I promise you it's not. And this actually comes from a really great discussion we had in our coaching community a week or so ago.

And instead of pulling from the call, which is kind of got private information in it, I wanted to just have a dedicated episode to this discussion of how do we manage our time so that we can get more done. And the specific strategy I'm going to talk about today, I can almost guarantee you're not doing, whether you're a beginner or advanced, you're probably not doing this. And it's such basic stuff. And I think the mistake most freelancers make when they're trying to manage their schedule or they have this big long list of tasks they have to get done in their business, whether it's all the things you learn from this podcast or it's the long list of revisions your clients gave you or all the projects you have coming up or something in between all of that, the mistake we make is we allow ourselves to either be led by feelings or led by others. And let me talk about each of those in turn because they're both detrimental to your career. First, let's talk about led by feelings.

Creatives are wonderful at tapping into their emotions and creating amazing art. But the side effect of that is we're really in tune with our emotions. And so we can tap into emotions to create great things. We also, a lot of times, are the slave to our own emotions, meaning that when we have a task list of things that we know we should be doing, because we don't feel like doing something, we don't do that thing. And instead, we tend to hyper-focus or spend too much time on the things that we are naturally drawn towards. And it all stems from the same thing. I don't feel like doing this. That sounds like you.

Not your head, Seiya. Brian, you got me.

To be honest, the truth is everyone struggles with this to some capacity. There's still things right now that you are ignoring because you don't feel like doing it. The podcast today, this one I'm doing right now, I almost didn't do it because I didn't feel like doing it.

So I could even fall victim to this as well. And because we don't do things because we don't feel like it, we constantly habitually ignore those things we need to get done, and we neglect those things. So that's one time management mistake is just being led by your feelings all day every day. We just do what we feel like doing. The other thing, and to me, just as damaging is being led by others. And here's what I mean. You ever gotten that text or that email from that client with revisions or them asking you to do something, and you immediately jump on it? That's the example of being led by others. It's that thing in your inbox or your DM, all of a sudden it changed your direction for that specific moment in time. Freelancers are horrible at this, and I can be a victim of this myself. Again, I'm not immune to these same mistakes. I can promise you that. But it's where we get that text or get that email, and we immediately feel like we have to get it done. And while that can make the client happy and make them feel like they're being taken care of, what that does is completely neglects your needs and what you need to have done in your life, in your business, whether it's personal, professional, business, you end up making everyone else happy at the detriment of yourself.