How to Balance Freelance Work With a Full-Time Job

If you want Balance Freelance Work With a Full-Time Job, Many people want to start working as a freelancer for a variety of reasons. Freelancing gives you the chance to be your own boss, learn new skills, and make extra money. But it can also be a risky job with no guaranteed pay or benefits, which makes some people hesitant to leave their stable jobs to become freelancers full-time.

Many people choose to start freelancing while still working a full-time job so they don’t have to go without a monthly income while they find freelance clients and build their reputation. It can be hard to figure out how to do freelance work on top of a full-time job, but it is possible.

How to Balance Freelance Work With a Full-Time Job

Prioritize your full-time work first

We can’t say enough about this. Give your full attention to your full-time job during normal working hours while you are working full-time. Don’t take freelance meetings at work, write freelance emails at work, or use PTO to finish a freelance job. If you’re in a position to start working “full-time” as a freelancer, check out our guide on how to go from working full-time to freelancing.

Understand the overhead with freelancing

If you’ve ever been a freelancer, you know that there are a lot of costs that come with the job. When you bring on a new client, you may have to meet with them a lot and talk to them a lot. That communication can take a lot of time, especially when it happens at different times, and it can take time away from your free time.

Plan for this cost (in time and money) as much as you can by working with “repeat clients” as much as you can. You can also come up with ways to make some parts of onboarding clients easier, such as making documents and other training materials.

Perfect your time estimates

When you don’t have much of it, your time is especially valuable. Learn how to make estimates that make sense for your schedule when you are scoping your projects, especially if you work from home. Let’s say that someone wants to hire you as a freelance social media manager. They want you to be able to make 10 Instagram in-feed posts, 10 Pinterest Pins, and 10 Facebook posts.

First, time yourself as you make one or two of the posts. Then, use that estimate as a guide to figure out how long it will take you to do the rest. Add more time to be safe! It’s better to overestimate so you can impress your client and get the job done faster.

Set clear client expectations when freelancing

With your freelance project deliverables, you want to be clear and to the point. Your client hires you to do work for them, and they trust that you’ll do the best job you can. Be clear about what the client wants, and if the project will take weeks or months, check in with them often.

You want to make sure you’re heading in the right direction and that the work you’re doing now matches what the client wants. You don’t have time to do work over again. Also, if you need to make a lot of changes, that will get expensive.

Avoid burnout while freelancing and working full-time

Be aware of how much time you spend working, and if you need to, give yourself some time off. Take a break on the weekend and unwind. If you can, sleep in! We wrote an article about how to avoid burnout to help you find ways that work for you if you are a freelancer or a professional who has to juggle a lot of responsibilities.

We recommend things like not working on weekends! Your side business as a freelancer may depend on you working on the weekends. If so, you might not want to work every weekend