What's your freelance to side-project ratio?
Lately I've found a nice sustainable balance between keeping the family alive with freelance work and experimenting with side businesses. What I do is cram my paid work up into the start of the week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning, and then give myself Wednesday afternoon onwards to work on [thus far] unpaid ideas.
This works pretty well to boost both. What I've found is the reward of guilt free side project time in a big juicy chunk really helps me to focus at the start of the week and be productive.
Of course most weeks I end up doing a few paid hours on Thursday and Friday too because clients need stuff and it's hard to leave good money on the table, but just leaving the door open to unbroken side project time has meant I get better focus on both sides of the coin.
What's your schedule like? How do you divide your time?
PS did you know the Wright Brothers funded their human flight tinkering by running a bicycle shop?
My setup depends on the time zone difference of my clients. Right now I spend the first 3 hours of my day working on freelance work. And then the afternoon is for side projects. My side project brings in more money at the moment so it’s the higher priority.
That's awesome! Congratulations.
I currently work for 2 clients about 5 hours/week each. The rest of the day I work on splitbee.io and feedback.fish!
My rate is high enough that 10/h week can easily pay my bills where I live. I don't have a family to feed tho :)
Nice, sounds like a good situation!
This is a struggle of mine for sure! About half of my income comes from my various business and the other half comes from freelancing.
I for sure enjoy working on my own projects more and when I'm working on them, I am betting on my future. However, I have four kids that I have to feed now and it's hard to turn down freelance work since the money is good and in high demand. I always have more work than I can seem to find time for!
My plan is to normally work for a few hours every morning on my own businesses, answering emails, building new features, checking in with my support staff, etc. Then I spend the afternoon working on freelance work. However, it hardly ever works out that way because I will get sidetracked working on something and then end up having to do freelance work after the kids go to bed at night.
I've been looking into implementing a "time blocking" like schedule to help me dived up my time a little more efficiently.
Awesome that half your income comes from businesses. What a great position to be in.
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It's tough getting started freelancing for sure. The way I started out was contracting to a former employer (web dev agency) and then later I picked up some work with a different web dev agency, and from there started getting network effects of clients telling other clients.