As a freelancer, your time is money. You bring a valuable set of skills and abilities to the table, and clients pay for your time. This means boundaries are essential to keep your business profitable. You must decide exactly how much time to give each client based on the terms of each individual contract agreement. Giving clients too much time can impact your budget and your personal energy resources that you will need for other tasks.
It’s only natural for clients to ask for more, which makes it necessary to set and maintain your boundaries to stay efficient and profitable. Using time tracking, you can not only streamline your per-hour billing, but can also set and hold your boundaries as a freelancer by ensuring your time is focused, efficient, and never goes into unpaid overtime.
Why Boundaries Matter in Freelancing
Freelancers often face challenges related to time management. While you enjoy the freedom of setting your own schedule, private contracts can also lead to inconsistent hours and blurring the line between work and personal time. Clients may try over communication to monopolize your time outside of your set work hours or ask for revisions and support beyond the scope of your contract, and this is time you can’t afford to give them.
Scope Creep and Undercharging
Nearly every freelancer has experienced the risks of poor boundaries. Scope creep and undercharging are the natural consequences of clients asking too much of a freelancer who is not yet skilled in setting boundaries. Clients naturally want more. They have ideas, suggestions, and sometimes demands that go outside the original contract terms for time or service. Trying to keep your clients happy can lead to overworking and undercharging for your valuable time.
The Road to Burnout
Of course, allowing scope creep and undercharging to enter your workflow is a formula for burnout. You may soon find yourself overextended, charging too little for the time you put in, and agreeing to extra work without the assurance of extra compensation. Many freelancers have been through this cycle and discovered that clear boundaries are the first and best way to ensure satisfied clients and a healthy freelance business.
Learning to set and defend your boundaries professionally makes a world of difference between stressful overextension and efficient, profitable contract completion.
How Time Tracking Creates Visibility and Structure
The key to effective freelancing is time management, for you and the client. Clients need to understand that they are paying for a finite amount of your time. Freelancers also benefit from a clear understanding of how their time is spent on each project, milestone, and task.
Time tracking creates clarity, accountability, and structure. By tracking your time, you can both bill clients for your professional time dedicated to their project and structure your work sessions based on how much time each task requires.
Data-Driven Boundaries
With time tracking, you can clearly define how many hours you are working. Start the clock when you begin working on a client’s project and stop when you take breaks or complete a task. This will create a structured record of your time and help you set clear boundaries for how much time you spend. Keep records not only for planned work sessions, but also time spent on additional tasks and communication.
Time tracking is a great tool for empowering your time management strategies. You can identify the real amount of time each day you dedicate to clients, and the time blocks you work during the day. At the same time, you are building a report that helps clients see the hours you are working on their project.
These time records can help you set boundaries and show clients that you are working within the boundaries you set.
Identifying Time Loss and Unpaid Work
Time tracking can also help you find where your time is being lost. As a freelancer, it’s easy to forget that client communications, add-on tasks, revisions, “one more thing” requests, and late-night sessions should all be part of your invoice. Any task that clients aren’t willing to see on the invoice should be excluded or renegotiated.
Time loss is a risk for any professional, but it can be a serious drain for freelancers who build a business on professional services paid at an hourly rate. If you’re working without compensation or allowing unseen time-wasting tasks to take up your time, you’re losing money and possibly sleep and peace of mind.
Enforcing Client Boundaries with Time Logs
Time logs allow you to create and keep a schedule with your clients. When you log your time spent on each project, it also allows you to communicate your availability with confidence and show records that you are maintaining a work schedule at the agreed times.
If your contract defines a certain number of hours or work during specific times of day, time tracking will create records that reflect your work and justify limits you set on additional requests for your time. If you agree to an hourly rate for the duration of the project, providing clients with time reports will justify your invoice charges with transparency that clients often appreciate.
Setting Time Limits
With time tracking, you can confidently set limits on the amount of time you are willing to dedicate to each client or project. This can ensure that you avoid stressful overtime hours that go beyond the scope of a reasonable work week. While clients may want you to work around the clock, time tracking ensures that you can state your availability with confidence and provide records that you are working during the entire time each week dedicated to your clients.
With time tracking, you can decline to work overtime with proof that you have already fulfilled your hourly obligations.
Transparent Invoicing
For contractors that bill by the hour, time tracking is the perfect way to build transparent invoices that reflect the time you have committed to each client and project. Well-documented time records show the hours you have put into each task, milestone, and meeting so that clients fully understand your invoices. Time tracked invoices can even encourage clients to use your time more efficiently.
Realistic Expectations
Using tracked hours also makes it easy to both set realistic expectations for how long tasks will take, prove your time spent on a task, and guard against the ‘scope creep’ that might use up more of your valuable time than was agreed on. When clients see how their requests are reflected in billed time and realistic weekly hours, they will be more able to respect the original scope of the contract.
Creating a Schedule and Sticking to It
The right schedule is the key to successful freelancing. When your time is money, time management can help you make the most of every day. Time management works best when you build a schedule and keep to your plans as closely as possible. Especially when it comes to clients.
Time Blocking
Start by using time blocking to define your work day. Your time tracking app can help you define blocks during the day for focus sessions, communication, and breaks to ensure you are always at optimal efficiency without building up undue stress.
Time blocks of 15-90 minutes allow you to focus on each task with your full attention so that you can make forward progress and complete milestones without distraction. Designate blocks for typical distractions like checking your email and other communication channels. Book time for scheduled meetings. Then create blocks for longer focus sessions where you can do your best work.
Your time tracker will help you align with your schedule and record the exact way your time is spent each day, even when it deviates from the plan.
Protect Your Off Hours
Keeping track of your “off hours” can help you protect your precious time for relaxation and stress relief. Sleep, meals, personal time, family time, and weekends will provide you with more joy and rejuvenation when they can’t be interrupted by work.
Tracking your off-hours can help you to fully restore your energy and focus between work sessions while maintaining full awareness of the time you spend away from work. Breaks are just as important to track during the workday, ensuring that you have time to decompress and refocus between tasks.
Build a Routine
Lastly, your schedule can help you maintain consistent working hours. Freelancers often enjoy the freedom of setting any personal working hours that can align with clients. Maybe you’re a night owl, or an afternoon person. While you don’t need to keep normal hours, establishing a routine can help to enhance your energy and focus while creating a schedule that you can share with clients to protect your time-based boundaries.
A routine helps to define your protected “off hours” for personal time and good sleep, establishes when you will typically deliver work during the day, and when you are available for meetings. This can ensure that you maintain a consistent workday and defend against client demands that go outside your scheduled work hours.
Tools That Help You Do This
Time tracking makes it easier to build your schedule and track your time to both set and maintain boundaries as a freelancer. You can define the time you spend on work, build invoices, and show your clients the hours you put it. The only question is which tool you will use to achieve your goals.
Time Tracker
Time Tracker by eBillity is a highly integrated time tracking tool. As you might guess, it was designed initially to help professionals generate invoices based on time worked. From that core principle, it has evolved to provide a dynamic toolkit of schedule building, automatic tracking, calendar syncing with your favorite calendar app, and automatically generated time reports. With Time Tracker, you can quickly designate your time based on client, project, task, and tags for transparent and dynamically useful time records. It also features a mobile app for easily logging your time on the go.
Toggl
Toggl was designed to provide simple stop-start time tracking. While easy, it lacks the sophistication of apps designed for an integrated business purpose. Details like clients, projects, and tags are manually added to each time record. Toggl has added business-friendly features over the years but is still at its heart a simple time tracker designed for simple one-dimensional tracking of your time during the day.
Harvest
Harvest was originally designed to track marketing services. Harvest has many different configuration options, but it can be challenging to find the ideal setup for your specific needs. It was built for an around-the-clock schedule and features. Like Toggl, manual selection is needed to start tasks, and you may often find yourself manually creating a new task before it can begin.
Communicating Boundaries to Clients
Clients will push your boundaries. It’s only natural for them to want more. As a freelancer, part of rocking your job is setting initial expectations and boundaries. Be firm about the number of hours you will work and the specific hours you are available during the day. Instead of pitching to the client, take on the confident role of a professional whose skills they need to get the job done.
Start by building your schedule and establishing your routine. This will help you set boundaries confidently, knowing when and how much you are willing to work for any given contract.
Example Email
Good morning,
I would be glad to help you build your web page. My skills include X, Y, and Z and I can help you build your website using A, B, and C stack technology. I am available for meetings and calls between 10 Am and 1PM and between 2PM and 5PM. I can provide you with 40 hours of work per week or a total of 120 hours of work for a three-week project.
My hourly rate is $____ which would equate $_ (rate x 120) for a 120-hour project
To build the website you envision, I suggest these milestones
1. _____________________ (6 hours)
2. _____________________ (10 hours)
3) _____________________ (4 hours)
4) _____________________ (7 hours)
5) _____________________ (2 hours)
I can accept up to 5 hours of revision work. Please see my feature sheet so explore additional features and the estimated time each feature would add to your website project.
This email template provides the basic structure a freelancer might use to define the scope of their work, the time they are willing to spend on it. You can provide time tracking data from previous projects to justify how long you state each task, milestone, or feature might require.
Explaining time limits and rates to clients in a confident and professional manner is the best way to ensure that your time is always well managed and respected.
Setting Freelancer Boundaries with Time Tracking
When you set boundaries, clients will respect your time. Using a time tracker isn’t just about billing, it’s about protecting your business profitability and your personal well-being. Time Tracker by eBillity makes it easy to build your schedule, keep track of your time, provide transparent reports, and convert your time into clear invoices that clients will appreciate.
Want to set boundaries and keep clients happy? Start tracking your time now. Try Time Tracker free for 14 days and take back control of your freelance schedule.