You can apply many strategies to boost your freelance business and keep it profitable, from having the right business tools to help you save time, by automating manual, repetitive tasks such as invoicing, to being consistent with your marketing to promote your business.
All these things and more are great for running your business, but what about keeping the most important person to your business nicely ticking over (i.e. you)? What are some self-care tips and habits you can apply?
Here are 5 simple but effective self-care tips to consider:
1. Start strong
Many entrepreneurs have a set morning routine, and starting your day off on the right footing and with a positive mindset makes sense.
Naturally, how you start your day is up to you and will depend on your circumstances. Some people like to start slow and ease themselves into the day with a little bit of meditative practice such as journaling or yoga (or both), whereas others like to hit the ground running, literally, by going for a run, a brisk daily morning walk, or an intense gym workout session.
If you have care duties, consider getting up a little earlier before others in the household to make some ‘you’ time. It doesn’t have to be anything too radical; it can be just a small ritual you make into a habit, just like brushing your teeth or showering.
The key is that it benefits you, makes you feel good, energizes you and is sustainable. You’ll be amazed at the difference a positive daily routine can make to your day.
2. Manage time
Being organized, planning ahead, and knowing what work you’ll be doing each day (creating and sticking to a schedule) can significantly improve your day.
Some freelancers ‘time block’ which means they block out certain parts of the day or a number of days which they allocate to specific tasks. The key is to not get continuously distracted by incoming tasks and find yourself firefighting the whole time.
Giving yourself more than enough time to complete tasks will help, too, rather than leaving everything up to the wire. If you’re always rushing about in an effort to get things done, it could lead to stress and freelancer burnout.
While there will likely be deadlines to adhere to and fast turnaround work in your freelance career, there’s no need to do everything at such a rapid pace. Giving yourself ample time to do things is all part of self-care.
3. Take regular breaks
It can be easy to get wrapped up in your work and forget about taking regular breaks, especially when you’re working from home.
But breaks aren’t just beneficial from a physical well-being perspective, such as avoiding sitting all day, reducing digital eye strain (if your work involves looking at a screen all day) or taking a break to rehydrate, eat mindfully and exercise, but also from a holistic perspective.
Taking breaks throughout the day can help with our creativity and allow our minds to relax. Often, during these break periods, when we take our conscious mind off the day’s task, our subconscious mind takes over and comes up with solutions.
That’s why we’re often advised to sleep on it when it comes to important decisions or dilemmas we face. Oftentimes, something that was a problem the day before can be solved following a good night’s sleep, which brings us nicely on to our next topic.
4. Optimize sleep
Sleep is important to our well-being. And while there may be people throughout history who famously seemed able to function on less sleep, such as Winston Churchill, digging a bit deeper, we often find there was more to it. For example, he is reported to have practiced bi-phasic sleeping, so while he didn’t sleep much during the night, he topped it up during the day with his famous daytime naps.
It’s generally accepted that around 7 to 8 hours or more sleep per night is optimal for an adult.
To help get quality sleep, there are things you can do to enhance your sleeping environment, such as sleeping in a quiet, dark room, turning off your electronic devices a few hours before bed and being mindful of sleep hygiene by making your sleep environment and rituals before you go to bed work to your benefit.
These could include a warm bath before bedtime, using earplugs, lowering the lighting, avoiding alcohol (or caffeine) drinks before bedtime, or doing some gentle stretches or meditation exercises. Or you could drop off into dreamland reading a good book.
Whatever it is, optimizing sleep is an essential self-care protocol that will benefit you in many different ways.
5. Eliminate unnecessary stress
Take time to identify your business’s stress areas and triggers and take steps to eradicate or at least minimize them.
If you have a tendency to overthink things or over-worry about things, you may find that the cure to overthinking is taking action. For example, if you find yourself being contacted by clients at all hours of the day, instead of getting stressed and worrying about it, the action you could take is to set proper boundaries and communicate your availability to your clients.
Another scenario that you may worry about is late payment of your invoices. You can help remove the stress of chasing unpaid invoices by automating the invoicing process with invoicing software that includes multiple payment options – making it easy for clients to pay you.
Invoicing software can help reduce the risk of your invoices not being paid on time. It can speed up the payment process and send automatic reminders before (or after) the invoice is due, saving you the cost and stress of getting paid late.
Invoice Ninja is a leading free invoicing software for small business invoicing, online payments, recurring invoices, tracking expenses and billable tasks. Try it for free here.
With our GoCardless integration, you can get paid on time and stress less. As soon as your invoice is due, GoCardless automatically collects payment, so you don’t need to chase it.
Check out all our payment gateways here.
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Mastering self-care can help you in all aspects of your life and can manifest in many ways, whether it’s celebrating your wins, getting used to taking time off work to go on a well-deserved vacation, or cheering yourself up by doing good things without any expectation of anything in return and paying it forward – self-care always pays off!
