The life of a freelancer looks like a dream for people who admire flexibility. After all, freelancing lets you control your professional life. You can work on projects you like, when you like and how much you like.
However, that might be the biggest cause of stress also.
When you work for yourself, you are both a boss and an employee. This causes a conflict between the two people, and if you don’t balance either of the sides, you’ll end up with chaos.
Plus, there are simply too many things to handle when you are a freelancer:
- Marketing yourself
- Getting new clients and retaining old ones
- Having too much or too little work
- Not able to manage the time and so on
On top of that, things are always changing and fluctuating in a freelancing business. Therefore, stress is inevitable.
But if you are here, you are still going to choose to freelance over a full-time job. Therefore, we are going to cover some actionable stress management tips for freelancers. So that you can continue to enjoy your freedom while being stress-free.
1. Maintain a work-life balance
This is number one of our stress management tips for freelancers for some obvious reasons.
As a freelancer, we have a choice to pick up our working hours, which is great if you are being productive. However, it doesn’t take a lot of time until you end up overworking as a remote worker and eventually burning yourself out.
This not only affects your physical and mental health, but it also reaches your personal life. And moments later you realize that the line separating your professional and personal life has become murky.
As a result—more chaos and stress. Overworking is a big issue when it comes to freelancing. It’s not just about being a workaholic or believing in hustling culture. In fact, you have to dedicate extra time to maintain the flow of your business.
There is marketing, invoicing, upgrading portfolio, managing website, and making sure that you have enough gigs in your hand. All these things take extra time if you are a freelancer.
Therefore, it becomes really important to draw a strict line between your working hours and your non-working hours.
You should be able to enjoy your life when you are working as a freelancer. Therefore, we have dedicated a whole article on this issue: How to Maintain Work-Life Balance as a Freelancer. Check it out for some solid practical guides.
2. Learn to budget
While it’s no secret that by working for the highest paid jobs, freelancers make more money than the average full-time worker. However, the money doesn’t last.
Because as a freelancer, there is no set amount that you will receive every month. The same is true for the dates on which you are paid. Your amount and date vary every month so it’s really hard to track your finances.
Hence, tracing your money and planning a budget is not an easy job. Saving money is even harder.
As a result, you might be earning good enough money, but you still might be living on paychecks to paychecks. Or at least, it’s hard to save any money at the end of the month.
This situation is creating a lot of anxiety and stress in your freelancing career. Not to mention that freelancers end up taking projects at lower prices to maintain the flow of money.
But nothing is going to work if you don’t learn to budget. In fact, this is one of the most important advice on—stress management tips for freelancers.
But the good news is, it’s not rocket science. You can learn to cover all your expenses and save some money if you know how to budget.
You can read the full article if you would like that. We have covered 7 ways to save money even if you are not making a lot right now.
3. Give up unhealthy habits
It’s all connected. We have certain bad habits that distract us from being productive. And when we are not being productive, it has consequences.
As a freelancer, you won’t be able to hit the deadlines or targeted work. This vicious cycle keeps on repeating and you develop more stress.
All this begins because you had few bad habits. So what’s the solution?
The solution is to let go of these bad habits or try to control them at least. For that, here are some solutions:
- Minimize your social media time. Use social media only to leverage your business and personal branding as a freelancer.
- Avoid multitasking because it doesn’t exist. Try to concentrate on one project at a time and give your energy to that only.
- Remember that perfectionism is killing your productivity as a freelancer. You constantly have to produce the work and if you tried to focus on making something perfect, you will get exhausted.
If you want to learn more about these ideas, we highly recommend you to check this article: 5 Habits you Must Give Up if you Want to be Productive
Here we have talked about how you can let go of the bad habits in natural and easy ways. These are some powerful stress management tips for freelancers.
4. Learn to be efficient
It’s called freelancing ‘business’ for a reason. A freelancer has all the responsibilities just like a regular business owner.
So if you are not being efficient at managing and running your business, things will go south. Attracting more stress!
Fortunately, you can learn to be efficient. Just like any other skill, you can master productivity. Perhaps, this is most important when talking about stress management tips for freelancers.
Here are some actions you can take to become more efficient:
- Divide your to-do list into manageable chunks. Setting a task such as “design a logo for a new client” will be difficult to complete. However, if you break the process down and then create your to-do list, it will be simple. Hence, divide the logo design process into steps and categories to make it easier to begin and complete the task.
- Get up and move. That’s right, we frequently forget to get some fresh air, which has a negative impact on our productivity. So, instead of staring at your computer screen for too long, take a break and go for a walk outside. You’d feel much more energized and refreshed afterward.
- Don’t forget to take regular breaks. Although it may appear to be counterproductive, taking regular breaks will help you complete more work. It’s just that you have to be very aware of it. Set your break time based on your working hours and what works best for you.
That’s not all. If you want to learn more about becoming efficient, we have got you covered. You can check this article.
Conclusion
These were some actionable and easy to follow—stress management tips for freelancers. Because it’s not easy to be a freelancer.
Working as a freelancer has many privileges and we often discuss about that. But freelancing also has other sides, and one of them is stress.
Therefore, take some time to use these—stress management tips for freelancers. So that you get more successful while staying healthy.
