Weekends Are For Freelancers Too — How To Overcome The Two Most Common Causes For Weekend-Work

Many freelancers work seven days a week because they think they can’t afford a day off. I don’t know about you, but I did not quit my 9-to 5 Job to have no free time afterward. Freelancers also need the weekend to relax. You can find out how to get your weekend back in this article.

One thing straight away: I’m not saying never to work on weekends. There will always be projects that have a tight deadline or customers that make it impossible for you to take the weekend off.

I say work as rarely as possible on weekends. The above examples must remain the absolute exception if you want to grow old healthy as a freelancer.

The tight deadlines and the special customers who want to be served on weekends are often just an illusion. Once you start to defend your weekends consciously, there are solutions for most of these cases that make weekend work unnecessary.

Let’s take a closer look at the two most common reasons for weekend work.

Tight deadlines

Today is Friday and Monday the ordered article must be ready for a magazine. Of the required 1000 words, you have not written a single one yet, because your research is not yet finished. What can you do to save your weekend?

The answer, in this case, is, unfortunately: nothing at all.

Once you’re in this situation, you can’t change it unless you cancel the whole job.

However, you can avoid such situations in the future by optimizing your planning.

So far, you have planned in such a way that weekends are optionally available for you to work on. You may have hoped every time that it wouldn’t be necessary to work on Saturday and Sunday, but in the end, it almost always came down to that.

If you plan your projects in the future, pretend that the weekend days don’t even exist. They are simply not available to you.

This forces you to plan your time in the week more efficiently. Analyze your workflow and look for ways to optimize it. Surely there are work steps that you can either outsource or cancel altogether.

Get away from the idea that everything must always be perfect.

Satisfy yourself with “good enough.” Good enough is always a result when you almost don’t notice the extra working hours in the result.

If you write a book and cut one out of four revision reviews, readers won’t notice the difference.

And that’s the crux of the matter: you work to satisfy your customers, not yourself.

The same applies to all other freelancers. The perfect result is hardly ever needed (unless you’re programming security software or performing neurosurgery).

If you have freed yourself from unnecessary steps by outsourcing or deleting them completely, you can better meet your deadlines in the future.

Another advantage of not planning the weekend for your work is that you procrastinate less during the week.

If you had decided in advance that you would have to finish the article this Friday, you wouldn’t have overrun your lunch break by an hour yesterday and probably continued working until seven in the evening the day before yesterday instead of four in the afternoon.

Customers who want to be looked after at the weekend

This point only applies to freelancers, who work directly with customers: web designers, SEO experts, editors, and similar freelancers. Book authors and bloggers are less affected.

But what do you do if your client wants a conference call on Sunday? If you say no, you could lose the whole job.

The only thing that helps is to define clear rules from the start. If a new customer knows from the beginning that you have specific business hours, you will have it more relaxed with him than with your old customers who are used to reaching you 24/7.

Exceptionally effectively, you can influence such extra requests from customers with your pricing. Take weekend surcharges, namely high surcharges.

Your customer will think twice about whether he wants to pay three times your hourly rate or whether his urgent request can wait until Monday after all.

Old customers who don’t want to accept your new conditions should be gradually replaced by new customers who don’t have a problem with the limits you set.

This process can take weeks or months, depending on the area you are working in. But in the end, the reward is your regained weekend.

Conclusion

Freelancers can and should get their weekend back. With a bit of consistency and smart planning, this is absolutely possible.

The cemeteries are full of people who considered themselves indispensable during their lifetime. Many of them worked themselves to death.

Don’t be one of them. Educate yourself and your customers with the tips mentioned in this article and improve your quality of life without taking fewer assignments.

Increase your prices for weekend work drastically or exclude the weekend from the outset if you accept a new customer.

If you don’t have direct customer contact, for example, because you are an author, plan your projects as if weekends didn’t exist. They are simply not available for your planning.

If you implement all these suggestions, you will soon never have to work on weekends again, or only a few times a year.

Freelancers deserve a free weekend, just like any other working person. Don’t let them talk you into anything else.

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