I listened to the course in the study vault and two comments that stood out to me were:
“If you can’t get work done in 8 hours a day, it’s probably because your time management is sloppy. ”
and
“Something takes as long as you decide it will take”
Here are my questions:
1. Even though I’m in the process of building my business, I want to keep a M-F, 9-5 work week with a 1 hour lunch. This is my ideal. At first, I thought this was silly, but if I decide I get do everything I need to do in 40 hours, I should be able to do it right?
2. The problem is that although 40 hours may be my ideal work week, I struggle to stay within those confines and often end up doing client work on the weekends as well. This isn’t honoring my word to myself and isn’t giving me a chance to relax and recharge. I feel stuck because I want to work less, but many of my current clients don’t pay me enough per assignment. So, I end up taking too many assignments per week to make the amount I need to pay my bills. And because so much of my time is taken up with these assignments that don’t pay a lot, I don’t have time to search for clients who would pay me a higher rate. This feels very frustrating!
3. If I’m already spending 40+ hours per week on client work, how can I find 2 hours of time every day to do focus time? and then another 2 hours per week for planning and review? I feel exasperated when I think this because I want to do it, but I don’t see how it’s possible. My ideal workday would be 4 hours on client work and 4 hours on work that grows my business. But, this too feels impossible at the moment.
4. Even if I do plan to take 5 hours from start to finish to write an article for a client, a lot of times it takes more time than I thought. Just last week, I thought I’d be able to write 500 words per hour for an assignment and was only able to average 250 words because it was on a hard-to-research subject on an unfamiliar topic. Because I write in different fields all the time (at least for now) this tends to happen. I don’t see how I can say, “Okay, I’m going to spend 3 hours on this article” and simply be able to do so because that’s what I said. I honestly can’t say for sure beforehand how long an assignment will take. How can I handle this? I hate that if I plan my entire week and even 1 estimate is wrong, it throws the whole week off.
Thanks for your insight.
