Work / life balance tips for designers
Work / life balance is a topic which pops up on a lot of blogs and forums regarding the life of a designer working for themselves. I wanted to add my experiences in an honest and candid way to help out those new to freelancing or those looking to hire a freelance designer or small design company.
I read a lot of posts and listened to a lot of designers talking about the way they manage design projects and their working time. Many people talking about their work / life balance and the mistakes they made when they first set out into the wide world of running their own business. Did I listen? Well… yes, although I needed to hit a few branches when falling out the ‘new to owning a business’ tree before the points hit home fully.
Everyone will say this – I am saying it again… Ensure you have a healthy work / life balance. Plan your business as you would were you still working for an agency or, if you started freelance from graduation, as you imagine it would be if you were working for a company. Think how you would like the boss to treat you and be objective in the way you schedule your working hours. Would you like to work 18 hour days and sleep only on weekends? How about planning from the start to work 8 hour days, 5 days a week with overtime being the exception rather than the rule? Now, that sounds better.
In fact, that is exactly what I set out to do when I switched from busy agency life to running Blink Design Studios full time. I had over 6 years experience and was a senior designer with project management and team leader experience – so I knew exactly what I was doing… right?
Well, actually, after setting out to work strict hours and using strict methods I soon found myself slipping down the slippery road to a slanted work / life balance, with the emphasis on work. Many people talk about the risks of working form home or for yourself as procrastination and a tendency to watch more TV than be productive. However, I found working from home easy, too easy in fact. I found myself slipping the other way. I would get up at 8am (A joyous lie-in I was happy for after commuting for years) then having breakfast, a shower and generally preparing for the day, was at my desk by 9am and took my hour lunch regularly. So far so good. 6pm however, came and went with ease. Being at my desk already and my desk being just upstairs on my off hours, I found it all to easy to carry on working. I would get a call or email from a client and be tempted to just do one more amend or get a head start on the work for the next day.
This quickly led to working quite late into the evenings, which quickly led to me thinking of my evenings are part of the working day and taking on more work accordingly. I won some really interesting pitches that month; one for a magazine cover illustration and one to create a new brand identity and website for an up and coming small businesses. However, I had scheduled so much work in that I soon burnt out and my productivity and quality of work were soon affected. I had little sleep and was wondering slightly how I had ended up making a rookie mistake despite being a senior designer. I lost the two clients after explaining to them that I had taken on too much work and apologising for the service they received. Both being great people, they took this well and were fully understanding and appreciative of my honesty in saying they ought to find a new designer. My chances of being re-hired were of course rightly somewhere around the zero percentage mark. My confidence and business’ reputation could have been better had I taken a step back and looked at my workload objectively. These early experiences after striking out on my own taught me a lot and made me a much better freelancer.
When you first start out it is all too tempting to take on every project you win and try to complete the work as soon as possible saying ‘Yes’ to everything the client requires. In actuality, it is better to take that step back and plan your working life to ensure you are always at your best and deliver the best service. This will be beneficial for both you and your clients.
To help with this I have put together a few bullet points of top tips for planning your design company life:
1) Plan your week or month based on standard working hours and using the ‘Swiss Cheese’ model of project planning (You can read a great article on this model on Freelance Switch here).
2) Pick a number of hours to work a week, or a day, whichever suits you best and stick with it. Over hours are the exception and for emergencies only. If necessary, put a huge poster above your desk explaining this with several exclamation points.
3) If possible, pick exact times to work with an hour for lunch. Routine will help you stick to your hours and plan your working and social life. If many of your friends and clients are working 9-5.30pm five days a week then match this, if all your clients are US based and you live in the UK, then you might want slightly different hours, find a balance that suits your business. This helps you be there when a client calls showing your reliable and available when they need you. Having a routine also means that clients can plan to contact you when it is suitable for you both and are less tempted to phone you during your off hours.
4) In emergencies work overtime. Check with yourself and the client if an emergency is really so before undertaking any overtime however and ensure it is the exception rather than the rule. Take time in lieu for the hours if possible.
5) Use your downtime effectively. If you have downtime divide it between promoting your business, networking, admin, research and rest.
6) Always take a step back and look at your business from the outside. If it helps – have a large chart with your project deadlines and hours marked on each month so you have a visual picture of where you are – is it is covered then suggest to a client when you can really do the work or call a freelance friend you trust who produces high quality work and suggest them to the client. If you cannot take the work and they can, you have suggested a designer to the client as well as helped a colleague and both will remember this in future.
7) Remember the key word in work / life balance is ‘Balance’. The highest quality work and happiest clients are those who work with freelancers who take this on board. If necessary – write this on a post-it note and stick it to your screen at 5.30pm to discourage you from turning your computer back on after dinner. If you find you’re still working more than you should and your work quality (and amount of sleep) needs improving, add another post-it note underneath which says ‘I’m serious’.
I alos recommend reading posts such as this one on Freelance Advisor: 10 things no one told me about freelancing.
I hope these tips and anecdotal musings help a few of you out there. Feel free to add your thoughts below and commend or contradict as you see fit.
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