Balancing Personal Life, Business, and Clients

The following is an extract from an email sent to Agency Academy Members. To learn more and become a member visit the Agency Academy Page on Boagworld.com. Join like-minded freelancers and agency owners. Learn with others how to run your business more effectively.

I am excited to be finally sending this first email to the Agency Academy members. I have been toying with the idea of this coaching community for ages and it feels great to finally get it off the ground!

Some of you were able to make the first video discussion and I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed it. For those who missed it, don’t worry, there will be many more to come. You can also find a recording of the first session on our Slack Channel, including a complete transcript and AI summary.

One of the topics of discussion was time management, a subject that is particularly challenging when you work on your own and have to do everything. I thought I would share a few thoughts on it here as we didn’t have time (oh, the irony) to get into it that deeply on the call.

That said, one topic we did touch on briefly was prioritization.

The Big Picture of Prioritization

We all know that prioritization is important, but I cannot help but think that we often approach it in the wrong way. We focus on approaches like the Eisenhower matrix, the 80/20 rule, or the 4 D’s (delete, delegate, defer, and do), but what we really need to focus on is the big picture.

If you look at it that way, there are three elements to our lives.

• Our personal life.
• Our business.
• Our clients.

Most of us started our businesses to allow us to lead the personal life we wanted. We need to ensure our business is healthy, so we can deliver that. To ensure our business is health we need to keep our clients happy.

Yet, the reality is often that this prioritization order flips. We end up prioritizing our clients over our business over our personal lives, leaving us feeling overwhelmed and burnt out. Moreover, our business ultimately suffers, and eventually, the work dries up.

So as we decide on how we allocate our time, we must ensure our personal life and well-being are taken care of first, and then our business.

Clients come last in this prioritization. That is not to say that we shouldn’t care about them. We just have to remember the aim: giving them great service keeps our business healthy. And that gives us the life we want.

This attitude towards our priorities also informs one of the critical elements of our time management - how much we charge clients.

Money Is Time

The amount of time we have to invest in ourselves and our businesses ultimately comes down to one simple factor. How much time do we need to spend on client work to generate the income we need.

If we have to work 40 hours a week to break even, that leaves no time to invest in our own business. We, therefore, need to be realistic about the charge-out rate we set.

This goes back to prioritization. Often we let our clients dictate our charge, our rate. We convince ourselves that “the market only allows me to charge so much.”

But, we need to charge enough to sustain the personal life we want. We also need to leave time for investing in our business’s growth and well-being.

To calculate your charge-out rate, you need to start by calculating your expenses and how much you need to take from the business each month.

Then you need to divide that by the number of days you work a month, not forgetting to take out weekends, public holidays and vacation time. For me, that leaves me with 19 chargeable days per month.

But the next step is the important one. I don’t calculate my hourly rate by dividing my daily rate by 8. There is no way I will (or should) be doing 8 hours a day on paid client work.

The average office worker is only productive for 2 hours and 23 minutes per day, so suggesting you will be chargeable for 8 hours is fantasy. At most, you should be working 6 hours a day to allow for lunch and breaks.

I work on the assumption that only 3-4 hours a day of my time will be chargeable, and I calculate my charge-out rate based on that. That leaves me with a couple of hours a day to work on the growth and development of my own business.

Now, if you do these calculations, you may feel that you could never charge that rate because clients would not accept it. If that’s the case, you need different clients, because failing that, you have to conclude you don’t have a viable business to support the life you want.

There is a lot more that I could say about calculating rates and I am happy to go through that in one of our calls if people would find that useful. Just let me know in Slack.

But once you know how many hours you need to work a day to be profitable, all you need to do is track that time.

Track Your Time

There is always more to do when running your own business. While as an employee you have agreed-upon hours, as a business owner you can feel like your work is never done.

Over time, this can quickly result in work beginning to encroach upon your personal life. Before long, you are working more hours. You neglect your personal life and, in the end, hurt your business. Remember, you cannot afford to burn out because if you do, you will stop earning.

I deal with this by tracking my time closely. I work only the hours needed to sustain my desired lifestyle and business growth.

I track everything, not just client work. If I hit 6 hours of work in a day, I tend to stop. I aim for 30 hours a week of work. Now that number might sound low, but that’s real work, not time faffing on social media or having a coffee. I turn the timer off for that stuff.

Tracking everything may sound obsessive, but it is essential for peace of mind. I know that when I walk away from work, I can be confident I’ve done enough to sustain my business. I no longer have that nagging feeling I haven’t done enough.

Of course, time management isn’t just about controlling the amount you work or even how you prioritize it. It is also about working smarter.

Work Smarter

This may well be another subject for a call because it is a deep and complex topic, but let me share a few key points.

First, have a system that helps you avoid procrastination. Take, for instance, writing this email. I could agonize over this forever, worrying about whether it’s as good as it possibly can be. But if I do that, I’ll never get finished and eat into my profitability.

Instead, I have a process for writing that I follow rigorously. Once I finish the process, I publish, regardless of how I feel about the final result.

Second, I reuse and recycle. I repurpose content, designs, code, and indeed everything. Whenever I produce something new, I always have an eye on how I might repackage it for another purpose.

Again, let’s take this email. I am already thinking I could turn this into an article for Smashing Magazine, as well as social media posts, and maybe even a topic on a podcast.

Finally, I rigorously enforce a “you get what you pay for” mentality. If a client has paid for me to work on a task for 4 hours, they get 4 hours, not a moment more.

Your desire to deliver good work is commendable, but you can waste hours chasing perfection. You need a “good enough within the constraints” approach. If you don’t, your business will not remain profitable. The clients who do pay you a decent amount are also short-changed compared to those who underpaid.

Scratching The Surface

Wow, this email has gotten away from me! Don’t expect every one to be this long! That said, I’ve only scratched the surface of time management. I’m sure it will be a topic that we’ll return to again and again. Let’s discuss it in future calls.

If you would like to participate in group coaching for digital agencies and freelancers, then you can learn more about the Agency Academy here.