How to Find Time to Work Towards Goals as a Freelancer

Another important factor here is how to find the time to work toward your goals. A solopreneur recently reached out to me — because I am a Solopreneur Success Coach – and they told me, “By the time I take care of other responsibilities, it's late at night and I am mentally and emotionally exhausted. Sagan, what do I do about this?” 

Here's my question for you: If this is something that you are also thinking, then my question for you is, is it really a time issue? 

If you are mentally and emotionally exhausted, then that indicates that it's not necessarily just a time issue, but it's also definitely an energy issue. So you'll actually want to focus on energy first before time. 

Energy management may include things like reworking your schedule to accommodate for more creative times of day, implementing energy boosters while you're working, shifting your perspective on the work you're doing, all of those types of things. 

I created a video on more about this topic and how to implement energy management in your business that you can watch here: 

Now, just because energy management is absolutely crucial here, it doesn't mean that time management is NOT important. Time management is absolutely something that you will still want to focus on. 

With that in mind, I have five tips here for you if you are wondering how to prioritize and balance your time for everything that you need to do during the day… 

1) Get very clear on what your goals are in your business and what tasks do you need to do in order to achieve those goals. 

Do you actually have a plan for making progress on your goals? What very specific actions will you need to take in order to make progress on those goals?

2) Get well acquainted with exactly how long it's going to take you to do each different task. 

Once you know which tasks you need to do in order to achieve your goals, then you can start to look at “Okay, how long does it reasonably realistically take me?” 

If you don't have that information, if you don't know that about yourself, if you're not honest with yourself about how long it takes you to do different tasks, then you won't be able to map out a timeline or a schedule or a strategic action plan for achieving your goals. 

And by the way, this does also include energy management, so you'll want to know how much energy each task will take you as well — and again, that type of thing is in my energy management video. 

3) Identify what tasks must happen in order for the next set of tasks to take place. 

Here you're really thinking about the order of operations. It's not just this big bucket full of tasks that you can just pull out of a hat. Instead you're really looking at, “If I need to do this task, what tasks need to come before that? What needs to happen before this task happens?” 

This is going to help you create step by step processes for yourself and have a very strategic concrete step by step action plan so you know exactly what you need to be doing, at what stages and in what order to make that really great progress on your goals. 

4) Input all of this into your schedule with no more than three tasks per day (and perhaps fewer than that; perhaps it'll just be one or two tests per day so that you don't get overwhelmed). 

We're striving for balance here. And that includes balance mentally, we don't want you to get overloaded or stressed or overwhelmed. So really reducing the number of tasks that you are doing, breaking those down and identifying what actually matters here. And what does this timeline realistically look like? 

5) Stay in balance with the big picture and the detail oriented things. 

This is key to great work life balance. It's about staying in balance with your perspective… Being able to zoom in and get tasks done on a very minute, daily basis; checking those tasks off of your to-do list, and then zooming out to get that great bird's eye perspective on things to make sure that you're still heading in the right direction toward your goals and that you haven't veered off path. 

You want to have a balance between the two. You absolutely need to have this kind of balance between big-picture, high level, bird's eye view of things and the very detailed, in depth, in the moment, task-oriented types of things. 

This is where I recommend doing weekly audits and check-ins with your business. Here you are looking at, “Where have we been this past week? Where are we going in the upcoming week?” 

I also recommend doing monthly performance reviews in your business: How are you doing when you're wearing one hat versus another as a business owner? Lastly, do quarterly check-ins, reviews, progress markers, and annual business reviews. These are good checkpoints for yourself so that every single day you don't need to worry about the big picture things because you already have it mapped out where you know when you'll be looking at the big picture stuff. 

That way, on a very day to day basis you can truly focus on those day to day operations. You can know that because of your previous big picture check-in, this particular daily task that you're working on, in this moment, absolutely connects back to the bigger picture. 

Stay tuned for our next video in this Work/Life Balance for Solopreneurs series, where we will be diving into how to enjoy great work life balance without self sabotage. 

Don't forget to grab my free training so you can access my signature framework on how to achieve incredible work life balance while skyrocketing productivity as a freelancer: