Just read a nice blog post on how to manage and balance your personal and professional lives. When you are working from home it is very difficult to draw a line between working and not working and sometimes I feel I am always working even during the weekends. I remember a few months ago I had planned a 15-day holiday and accordingly I had prepared a schedule to complete a client’s assignment. He not only delayed the assignment he also kept calling me and sending me e-mails and I ended up working all my holidays and this really created a crisis in my family.
I think having clients from all over the world does take its toll because they all have their own working schedules and sometimes I have to adjust my work timings accordingly. Still, from inside I know you can draw a line if you really want to. What can be the cost? Maybe you will lose a few assignments but it’s not worth it if you are losing out on quality family time and even your health.
I am gradually deciding on what days I want to work and on what days I don’t want to work. That’s why now I have specifically mentioned on my website (look at the top-right side) what days I am working. I don’t even take the weekends off in the conventional sense because it doesn’t suit me personally. For example, on Mondays I have my music class and I cannot simply miss it. Since my teacher (he is around 70-year-old) uses public transport to come to my place (yes, even at that age he is quite healthy and doesn’t find public transport daunting) I am never sure when he is going to reach and this creates lots of disturbance. Besides, almost all my music classes are extremely exhausting by the time we are through, at least for me. This practically used to waste my Mondays completely, work-wise. Then my wife suggested that I should have my weekend on Sundays and Mondays instead of Saturdays and Sundays. I am still getting used to not working on a Monday or at least not worrying about work.
No longer I spend around 12 to 15 hours working on my laptop; the moment I have worked for 8 hours I call it a day and these 8 hours, beside my writing assignments, also include blogging and supervising other writers.
Striking a balance is really essential if you really want to make your freelance business meaningful. You leave your regular job and start working on your own because you want to enjoy life and don’t want to spend it in the daily grind of commuting to your office and then remaining in that unfriendly building all day. You want to be with your family, you want to see your kids running around you when you are working and you want to be with your spouse when he or she needs someone to be with. There is no purpose in getting on the verge of achieving all this but not getting it just because you cannot organize the way you handle your work.