Balance & Time Management
There never seem to be enough hours in a day to get everything done. It’s a daily balancing act - do you sacrifice sleep to get a project done or enjoy some free time after a long day? Do you throw away the workout in favour of productive hours towards a deadline? Do you delay that personal project another week, since you already have so much on your plate? What about meals, chores, health—the list of things to do becomes endless. If you let it.
Of course, we are heavily limited by what we can do in a day. Even at peak efficiency, there’s always going to be something left unfinished. But that isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. Scarcity is preciousness - including for time. It’s a question of managing it.
The biggest lesson that freelancing has taught me is time management. One that I am evidently still learning as I’m filling in the plan for this blog at nearly midnight before a 6-am wakeup tomorrow. Well, inspiration strikes when it does. But through the years of trial and error and slowly polishing my workflow and schedule, I feel like I’ve gotten a solid foot in the door.
The efficient use of your time can make all the difference in every aspect of your life. The caveat is that it takes time to learn. And lots of trial and error.
The key lessons I’ve learnt and am very much still learning are: making a routine and non-zero days.
Currently, I am working full time, attending classes, exercising 5-6 days a week, studying, working on personal projects, and finding time for myself. By far my biggest point of pride though is (generally) maintaining a solid sleeping schedule. BUT, this has taken me no less than 5 years to attain. And is not always consistent. There are still (many) nights where I stay up much later than I should and regret it the next day. Days when I decide to skip a workout in favour of meeting a deadline. Or times when I feel completely overwhelemed by all of it. But the most important thing to me is an overall consistency in the right direction.
The routine makes structure, which makes it easier to plan your day. If you generally know that you have an hour in the mornings, and prepare the evening before, it’ll save you the stress of running around and wondering if you’ll fit everything in. Having a 30-minute bus transit gives you some time to read or listen to a podcast. Regular breaks are important as well. For myself, I strictly don’t work on weekends; at most, I’ll answer emails or messages. I used to work 6 days a week, or come into work whenever I had orders. This absolutely destroyed my productivity, and did a number on my stress levels. Being able to block out specific times in the day to be productive—and even separating that into categories like work and study—allows the productivity to feel more productive. And scheduled breaks feel so much better.
The concept of non-zero days has helped immensely in fitting in my passions, like studying Japanese and reading. I used to think that I didn’t even have 10 solid minutes I could find to concentrate, as I was running around so much. And more than anything, I felt like if I don’t dedicate an hour or more to something, it wouldn’t be worth it. No time or energy for a workout? Then I’ll do it when I have energy. This meant workouts disappeared. Same with studies - I would put it off until I finally had set aside ‘enough’ time, and then felt overwhelmed. So I learnt about ‘non-zero days’. One pushup a day is better than none over ten days, followed by bursts of twenty. One page a day is better than none. Walking a little bit around the room is better than not moving at all. These little efforts accumulate, and before you know it—you’ve made yourself time in your schedule to do the things you enjoy or need to.
Like everything, these changes take time to make and time to implement. But with time, it gets easier, and you get better at it.
When I started freelancing, every single order turned into a last-minute rush to the deadline, and was a looming, ominous challenge to overcome. My time management did not really exist, carried over from my school age where procrastination was my motto. In school, consequences might be a bad grade, a bad night’s sleep, and an email to your parents—though this genuinely was heavily dreaded at the time. But for work, a missed deadline or poor quality meant a client that does not come back. A low rating. A loss of confidence. And the consequences were direct, to my earnings.
Of course, the ideal would be weeding out procrastination without having to brute force it. But the reality check of what I was losing out on was a catalyst to change. That combined with the fact that my primary focus was and is voiceover, something you can’t rush and need to invest time and energy into. If you have a paper due at midnight you can stitch something together with a pot of coffee and some elbow grease. But if you have 4 hours and you haven’t even started on an audiobook that takes at least 8? No way out of that one.
Luckily I learned my lesson, though it took many close calls and unfortunate, last-minute, apology-filled extensions. With time I built my workflow, which now has a heavy focus on organising and splitting up daily and hourly work in terms of feasibility, and with high flexibility which allows me to make changes without influencing deadlines, most of the time.
I’ve also found that honesty is usually the best policy. Rather than making an excuse for why the project was delayed, a sincere “I sincerely apologise, but I underestimated the workload and did not properly organise this,” will go very far. And in order to avoid that, I try my best to stick to my routine, stay flexible, and constantly keep improving.
I sincerely do look forward to where I’ll take my habits from here on out. How will my routine change? How exciting!
