6. Spend less time on client work with theme days

Running a freelance business can be split in two parts: client work, and business development work. But we often find ourselves saying "yes" to new projects that fill up our time, so the biz dev work has to be squeezed around the edges. How do you make time for both? In this episode, Louise shares how she uses theme days to structure her week.

"Theme days are a way to take back ownership of your time and energy. Each day, you only work on that day's theme, such as client management, marketing, finance, or whatever. You don't do that work on any other day, and you don't do any other work on that day.

"If you don't control your time, someone else will. With theme days, you'll be able to stop bumping those all-important business development tasks to next week and get it all done without feeling overwhelmed." -- Louise Shanahan

Louise Shanahan is a freelance health copywriter and content marketer. She's on a mission to help others build a business and life they love – in weekly snack-sized bites.

Resources mentioned

10X Freelance Copywriter by Copyhackers
Upsource (virtual assistants – tell them Louise Shanahan sent you!)
Trello
FreeAgent

Say hi to Louise!

Twitter: @LouiseShanahan_
LinkedIn: Louise Shanahan
Instagram: @Louise_Shanahan_
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Music credit: Just Smile by LiQWYD
Cover art: Hello I'm Nik

Transcript

Welcome to 15 Minute Freelancer, your snack-sized guide to being your own boss and building a business and life you love. I'm your host, Louise Shanahan. My LinkedIn bio says I'm a freelance health copywriter. But for the next 15 minutes, I'll be tickling your ears with practical strategies, behind the scenes stories, and nuggets o' wisdom so you can create a freelance business that works for you. Whether you're just starting out or you've been self-employed for a while, I'll be right here with you to help me navigate the ups and downs of freelancing life. So, grab a coffee relax and join me for 15 minutes of freelancing fun. Don't forget to hit subscribe! 

Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of 15 Minute Freelancer. I hope that it's a beautiful day, wherever you are, whenever you're listening to this. Last week, I talked about freelancer burnout, and how the pandemic had left a lot of us feeling a little bit (or a lot) more stressed out and anxious than usual. Or just generally struggling to keep our energy and motivation to our usual levels. I mentioned theme days as one of the strategies that I've been using to help keep things on track. I got a few questions about it, so I thought it would be fun to expand on that idea a bit more and explain what exactly I mean by theme days, and maybe how they can work for you. 

So, what are theme days? In short, the idea is to give each day of the week a theme, like content creation day or client work day or finance work day. You only do that kind of work on that day. It's basically a time management system. The problem this is solving is essentially about helping you cut down on the amount of context switching you do. 

Context switching would be where you are doing one kind of task, and then you realise you have something else to do and you jump to do another one. And then maybe you get a Slack notification and you jump in to have a conversation with someone. And then you get an email notification and you go into your inbox. And basically you start organising your time around other people's agendas, and you're not focusing in a deep way on any one task. You're kind of jumping from one thing to another. Using theme days is a way to get around that. 

It can save you time, it can help you be more productive, and it cuts down on overwhelm, because it's bringing a bit of structure to your week. That can be a bit tricky if you're working for yourself, and you don't have the usual sort of structures of being in a “regular job”. 

It's a way to kind of manage your energy better as well, I think, because you get to decide how you organise your time. And you can choose which kind of tasks you do at certain times of the week, or certain times of the day, according to when your energy is at a level that's most appropriate to get that work done. 

This is an idea that I actually pinched from Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers, when I did the 10X Freelance Copywriter course a few years ago. I've adapted it to suit my personality and my business and my lifestyle, and you can basically do the same. I will talk you through how it works for me, and maybe you can pinch that idea for yourself. 

How does it work? First of all, you need to decide how much time you're working with in a week, how many hours do you want to work per week, and over how many days? Then you need to decide what themes you need. You look at what work needs to be done, and then you just split it up accordingly. 

For me, I start by thinking of all my work in two parts, there's client work, and there’s business development work. So there's all the work that I do, that's client facing. And then there's the work that I do by myself to build a business and market myself and so on. Let's start with the client work. The chances are, you're spending the majority of your time on client work. Introducing theme days might mean cutting down on the time that you spend on client work. And before you throw your headphones down in horror, let's just think about this a minute. 

Client work ends up taking up the majority of our time, because that's what makes us money, right? But to build a business that truly works for you, where you're not chasing your tail, requires a bit of effort to generate leads, and attract new clients, and get your name out there, and put in place systems so things run smoothly. And that takes time too. You know, you're doing this work, it has to be done. We shouldn't really think of that as free work that has to be squeezed in around the edges. Your rates should factor in the time that you spend on marketing and business development to (and of course, expenses, holiday and sick pay, etc.), so you're not feeling like you will be struggling financially if you don't say yes to every single project that comes your way, regardless of how many hours you have to actually do the work. 

This is a way of kind of getting around that, but there is a bit of a mindset shift in thinking, “I should be spending probably a bit less time on client work each week, than maybe I am right now.” That was definitely something I had to get my head around. 

The first thing is to think about how much of your time goes to client work. An ideal week for me is probably about a 60:40, split, i.e, three days on client facing work and two days on the other stuff. And if that sounds completely unworkable for you, right now, I get it. If you're going from maybe five days or even more of client work, and you want to add these for other business tasks, you need to find a way to keep your income at the same level. 

When the theme days work well, you're more productive. You'll be surprised at how much you can get done, when you're not trying to do everything at once. So there's that. But you do also need to bear this in mind when you're booking in new projects and setting your rates. Don't tell a client on Tuesday that you can deliver on Friday, if it means you have to sacrifice business development time. Tell them you do it by next Tuesday, or whatever. Clients don't need to know exactly how you're organising your time. 

So on the client side of things, the tasks break down into three categories: doing the work, getting the work and managing the work. Doing the work for me, that's copywriting. That's the actual project work of researching, writing, drafting, editing. Getting the work – now here I'm talking about client specific work, not the general marketing stuff.) So this might include following up leads, writing and sending proposals, onboarding activities, like setting up project folders or whatever. Managing the work is everything you do to keep the projects running smoothly. So that would be staying in touch with clients with progress updates, chasing for background materials, any presentation calls you might do asking for testimonials, offboarding, liaising with other people who are involved with the project, all of that stuff. 

All the client facing work comes into those three categories. Because I tend to work five days per week, that leaves me two days, or two and a half days for the business side of things, which includes:

-       Marketing – that's planning content, setting up funnels, cold pitching, networking, writing, guest posts, all of that kind of business development type work. 

-       Content creation – that would be writing blog posts, recording the podcast, writing social media posts, all the things that you planned out on the marketing theme day.

-       Finance – that's checking all your invoices are up to date, reviewing expenses, making sure you're setting aside money for tax each month

-       You might have an admin theme – that could be everything around setting up systems, updating your project management tools, liaising with your VA, learning a new software, etc. 

And then you might have other things, I don't know, could be learning and training, catching up on reading, and participating in memberships or courses or that kind of thing. That might be a separate theme as well. It's up to you how many days you work per week, and how you divvy them up. 

How do you decide what theme goes on what day? You could stick to the same timetable each week. I tend to be more flexible, because real life. It's nice to say, “in theory, I only do client management on Tuesdays, so I'm only taking calls on Tuesdays.” But the reality is that clients can’t always do that. And if you're completely inflexible, you risk dragging things out for weeks until you're both free on a Tuesday. You can do that if you want. But I usually try to be a bit more flexible. If I end up with a call booked on a Thursday, I'll try to do other calls for that day. But no biggie if they end up on two different days. 

I will try to keep three days per week completely call free. Some people keep Mondays free. Some people like to keep Mondays and Fridays free of calls. Whatever works for you. You get to decide. 

Choosing which theme goes on which day. I don't stick to the exact same timetable each week. I usually decide on a Friday what my theme days will be in the following week. And that allows me that flexibility. I get to still have the theme day structure but it's not so rigid that every Monday is exactly the same each week, for example. On a Friday, I'll look ahead at what's coming up and I'll decide how I'm going to organise the week. Generally, I like to have Mondays be for content creation, Tuesdays and Wednesdays for client work, and Thursdays for maybe half client work, half marketing. And then Friday is usually a Freedom Day, which would be catching up on any additional client work finishing off content or maybe doing some training or just having some time off. It's usually a slower paced day. 

I do also sometimes do some catching up at the weekend. I don't have any kids. My timetable is super flexible, especially at the moment in lockdown. And I like to be able to have shorter days during the week. I know some people like sticking to the nine to five, Monday to Friday agenda and having weekends free. But when you're the boss, you don't have to do that. You could have Wednesdays free, you could work three days a week… and you know obviously if you're working part time, you'd want to adjust this accordingly. But for me, I'm pretty flexible. Most of my days feel quite similar And I'm quite happy with that. 

What does each day look like? Planning your work for each day. I use Trello. My virtual assistant (shout out to Caroline at We Are Upsource) Caroline set up a board for me with a to do list for each theme. And then each day when the relevant theme day comes around, I just dip into that to do list. If I don't get everything done, let's say it's content Monday, if I don't get everything done in terms of creating content one Monday, it just goes on the to do list. And then I don't think about it again until the next Monday, or whichever day the next week I'm doing content. 

I use a paper diary to track deadlines during the week so that I can still see an overview of what needs to get done in each week. Each day starts with looking at the paper diary for any calls or appointments or deadlines. And then I look at the Trello to do list and work through that. 

During the day, I usually work in two-hour chunks of deep work with fairly generous breaks in between. I probably do two two-hour chunks each day and a one-hour session at the end where I'll be kind of tidying things up, updating the to do lists, sending emails, all that kind of thing. 

The idea is that you only do the work for that theme on that day. If it's content Monday, you don't get distracted and start looking at your Free Agent transactions. But as I keep saying, it's all flexible. You can decide how many days you are working per week, how many hours, which exact themes you need. You can do some things on a fortnightly or monthly basis if you prefer. And there might be some things that actually need to only be done a few times per year. You would maybe factor that in as well. Maybe you have a quarterly goal setting day or an annual day for doing your taxes and catching up with your accountant or whatever. 

Really, this is about taking back ownership of your time and your energy. It's about building in systems that work for you and your business and your family and whatever else you have going on in your life. Because if you don't control your time, someone else will, or you'll get distracted and then kick yourself later for wasting time. That's me. 

I don't always stick to the theme days 100%. And in fact, during the pandemic, I've I found it a bit harder than usual for various reasons. But this is the goal. I've been doing it for a few years. And when it does work, when I do stick to it, it works really well. Even if you can just have a couple of days per week where you're setting aside the time for a particular theme, it does work so well. You can be so much more productive and get more done. These are the things that just get keep getting pushed back to the next week to the next week, and before you know it, six months have passed and you haven't published a blog post, for example. So give us a shot. Let me know how it goes. As usual, you can message me on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram if you have any questions. I would love to hear how you get on.

Speak to you soon. Bye. 

You've been listening to 15 Minute Freelancer with me, Louise Shanahan, freelance health copywriter and content marketer at thecopyprescription.com. If you enjoyed this, please hit subscribe, leave a review or share it with a freelance friend. And if you've got a freelancing question you want answered on the podcast find me and say hi on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. Thanks, and until next time, happy freelancing!