How many hats do you wear?

When you go freelance, the realisation suddenly dawns on you that you are responsible for every aspect of your business.

You have to market yourself, send out invoices, chase for payment, buy in any supplies you may need, sort out the printer when it goes wrong, make the coffee, do social networking, answer the phone etc etc.

When do you carve out time to actually do your work?

• Admin and office management tasks are essential activities but they don’t earn you any money, so don’t spend any more time than absolutely necessary on them. Try and set aside some time each day when you do your ‘running your business’ type tasks. Order your printer toner, phone up a client’s accounts department, do some filing. Focus only on this for, say, half an hour and then go back to your client work.

• By setting aside a chunk of time for this each day means you can concentrate your efforts for the rest of the day on stuff you’ll get paid for. Of course, if you find you have an unexpected bit of free time (eg: a meeting has been cancelled), then this is the perfect time to progress some marketing tasks or catch up with mundane tasks like backing up your computer files.

As a freelancer, what do you find the hardest part about wearing so many hats?