“I wish I had more time.”
“I would freelance if I had more time to get work done.”
Does this sound like you? I often write about getting things done because I hate excuses and I can’t stand lazy people. I know that you don’t have any excuses nor are you lazy because you’re here. You’re reading this because you really wish you had more time to get things done and make more money. I’m here to help you.
I wanted to show you how you can freelance when you have no time (in your own words).
Are there super-secret strategies that only Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have access to? Do you have to be brilliant? Do you have to graduate from a prestigious school? Not at all.
This is exactly how you can find time to make money freelancing when you already feel stretched to the max…
Find work that isn’t time sensitive.
It would be a bit challenging to find work as a personal trainer if you’re only free after midnight. You also wouldn’t get many students to tutor if you’re only free in the early mornings. The trick is to find work that isn’t time sensitive and fits well into your schedule.
If you can perform your freelance work at your convenience when your schedule allows you to, then you’re ahead of the game.
Now it’s time to answer the million dollar question…
How do you find work that isn’t time sensitive? Look into performing a freelancing service that doesn’t require you to teach anyone anything. If you have no time, you won’t be able to tutor or give any lessons. However, you can write articles, do programming, design sites, build kitchens, and do anything else along those lines.
Optimize your free time.
It’s far too tempting to blow your free time. Why work when you can watch X-Factor or hockey (okay bad joke)? Why freelance when you can just meet up with your buddies for a drink at the bar or a cup of coffee down the street? It’s easy to squander time.
What you have to keep in mind is that money comes and goes. Time goes and never returns! It sucks but it’s true. This is why I always promote the idea of optimizing your precious time.
How can you optimize your free time so your few hours a week lead to real money?
- You could outsource something or cut something out totally. You can pay someone else to perform mundane tasks in your daily life that are holding you back. You can also totally cut something out that’s not really needed (hanging out with your partner shouldn’t be cut out, sorry).
- Work without any distractions until you’re done. You have to kill the distractions, get to work, and not leave until you’re done. Watching tv the whole time won’t help.
- Wake up earlier or go to sleep later. Hey, I never said this was easy. Can you wake up an hour earlier? Can you stay up a bit later? I promise you that the sacrifice will be worth it. You’ll earn more money to pay down debt and build up your savings.
Once you figure out this whole time issue, you can move on to the next step…
Find higher value work.
What skills do you have that someone would be willing to pay for? Now imagine someone that would pay top dollar for your skills. You can’t be everything to everyone. However, you can be a tremendous help for a few folks willing to spend money.
By biggest problem when I started freelancing was that I would work on small projects. I was afraid of rejection and worked on minor projects. Then I realized that I was wasting time and getting nowhere.
Now I try to find higher value work that pays better and allows me to make good use of my time.
You don’t have to worry about becoming an entrepreneur and consuming every single book on the topic. You just have to use your real skills to make money. A rather simple concept if you asked me.
Are you ready to use the little time that you have to make more money? And please before you boast about how busy you are, please try to remember that there are folks with kids and a family that manage to freelance. Your busy love life isn’t so impressive.
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I had to optimize my free time for more than a year before I was able to move over to full-time self employment. My trick was to literally work from my phone or laptop any minute that I wasn’t doing something else. But I would have a life and just work completely around it. That is how I pulled off the full time job, seeing friends and family on the weekends, and put in 40-60 hour weeks online too. Glad I can just put in 40-50 hours a week now total, but I did learn how to optimize at least.
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