Overworking and Freelancer Burnout - Susie Jackson

3 approaches to a consistently heavy workload so you can avoid freelancer burnout

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It turns out that freelancer burnout is a thing. Recently, various studies seem to be showing that self-employed people are more likely to experience burnout than employees of the same age. This isn’t really a surprise. Our businesses are our babies, and we rarely manage to switch off from them completely.

One of the biggest causes of burnout is a consistently heavy workload. As freelancers and small business owners, we have a tendency to run ourselves into the ground to keep our customers happy. And as our businesses grow and we get more clients, we can easily find ourselves overloaded with work on a day-to-day basis. All too often, overworking becomes the norm rather than the exception.

We often think that it’s a good thing if we’ve got lots of work. It means our customers are satisfied, and we should feel happy about getting more projects than we can handle, right? Wrong. Overworking ourselves on a daily basis isn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, our businesses or our health will suffer (probably both!). If we want to look after ourselves and run a business that will support us in the long term, we need to be wary of crossing that fine line between loving our work and dedicating ourselves to it 24/7.

In this blog post, I’m therefore sharing 3 different approaches to help you deal with too much work. If you’re experiencing a heavy workload on a consistent basis, read through the below strategies and ask yourself which one might be best suited to you.

How to deal with too much work

Approach 1: Streamline your client base and/or your offering

One of the easiest things you can do to reduce your workload is to increase your prices. It’s unlikely that all your clients will accept a price increase, so this will enable you to quickly lighten your workload. Similarly, higher prices might make potential clients think more carefully before engaging your services. This will ensure you’ll have fewer projects flowing through the door that you have to deal with.

This might seem like a bad thing, and the thought of less work might leave you feeling scared. But the aim of this strategy is to cut down your workload while maintaining your income at a good level. If you increase your prices enough (especially with new clients), you’ll hopefully be making just as much but from far less work.

Another way to streamline your client base is to focus on your profitability. Ask yourself which customers and services represent your most profitable sources of income. You might notice that the clients earning you the highest hourly rates are all in the same industry. Or perhaps a particular service offering always seems more lucrative for you.

If this is the case, you can look at narrowing down your offering and focusing on these client profiles or services to make sure you’re always making as much as possible per hour. Not only will you be working on more profitable projects more frequently, you’ll also find that becoming more specialised will allow you to command higher prices. The more of an expert you are in a specific field or industry, the more potential clients will expect to pay.

In this blog post on how to increase your prices consistently, I take you through the process of raising your rates and assessing your profitability step by step.

Approach 2: Maximise your billable time

Another response to the issue of a heavy workload is to make sure that as much of your time as possible is billable. The aim of this approach is to decrease the amount of time you’re spending on anything that isn’t paid client work.

One way of doing this is to automate and streamline as many of your processes as possible. There are so many tools and software out there that will help you handle repetitive tasks and reduce the time you spend doing things manually.

For example, if you’re still creating each of your invoices individually in Word or Canva, you could consider using an invoicing tool such as Zoho Invoice or LSP.expert (for translators). Creating and sending invoices in just a few clicks will save you time and allow you to dedicate more of your working hours to paid client work.

Another way to increase your billable hours is to outsource unpaid work, such as content writing or graphic design. If you write a blog for your business, rather than doing everything yourself, you could consider hiring a writer or someone to help you with the graphics so you free up more time for client projects.

Whether or not this approach will work for you obviously depends on what proportion of your time is currently spent on client work compared with unpaid tasks. If you’re already automating as many tasks as possible and you aren’t doing any marketing because you don’t have any time left in the day, this approach isn’t the one for you!

Approach 3: Increase your capacity

The final approach I’m proposing is to increase your capacity by getting support on client projects too. You can do this by outsourcing paid work to trusted colleagues. If you go down this route and are managing the project, always make sure you’re earning a decent mark-up to cover the time you spend on communication and quality control. If you can’t afford to outsource because you’re not able to pay your service provider and earn a decent amount for the hours you’re dedicating to the project, you need to raise your prices first.

Alternatively, for more regular support than you’d get outsourcing, you could consider hiring an employee. This comes with its own set of difficulties and legal complications, but if you consistently have enough work for 2 people, it might be worth taking this option into consideration.

Depending on who your clients are and whether you have a strong personal brand, this approach might not be a viable option for you. For example, for my mentoring business, if I started paying someone else to take calls with my mentees on my behalf, the likelihood is it wouldn’t go down very well!

It’s also important to ask yourself if you enjoy working closely with other freelancers and project managing, as not everyone does. When you outsource work, there’s only so much control you can have over the final deliverable (especially if you’re outsourcing translations into a language you don’t speak, for example!). And depending on who you outsource to, you can’t always rely on others to deliver on time. Some people find this lack of control stressful and anxiety-inducing, so before you embark on this path, ask yourself whether it’s right for you.

Over the years, I’ve come across many freelancers and small business owners who have tried these approaches to varying degrees of success. What I’ve learnt is that the right option for each individual is personal. The approach that works for one person won’t necessarily work for another.

When you have too much work, there can be a temptation to think that the ‘natural’ progression is to expand, to outsource work and to hire members of staff. But this all depends on what success means to you. If expanding is what you want and it will allow you to achieve your long-term vision of success, then great. But if you actually want to keep things simple and enjoy working on your own, raising your prices and streamlining your offering might be a better direction for you to take.

Your idea of success won’t be the same as someone else’s, and you shouldn’t feel forced to follow conventional routes. The important thing is to make sure you’re developing your business in a way that will make you happy in the long term.

If you don’t have a clear vision of what success looks like to you and you’re unsure which approach to overwork is right for you, you’re likely to benefit from my mentoring programme Shift to Success. Over the course of 3 months, we’ll identify your version of success before putting a concrete plan of action in place to help you achieve it.

Find out more about Shift to Success