What Would (Or Do) You Do To Balance Work and Health?

byrobert2704

542 followers

Updated 3 weeks ago

Hi all.

As some of you may know, I’ve been freelancing for ages, but not always full-time. Health gets in the way. I tend to stick with part-time and keep the commitments on the low side. Nothing too strenuous like requiring 14-hour work days or the like.

For those who don’t know, when freelancing, there’s a big difference between work and billable work. Realistically, 20 billable hours in a week is full-time. I tend to stick with 5 to 10 hours and have other wee odd jobs here and there without tight deadlines.

On the run-up to Christmas there, I seriously overdid it and it took its toll on my health. Luckily, I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I can afford to scale back for a bit for a wee while like a couple of months, 3 tops.

I’ll never stop freelancing because I love learning from the various projects, and it’s great for the quick wins in terms of revenue - when I can keep it up. The drawback is in times like now when I can’t and have to take a step back because of health reasons. There comes a point when I know I’ll be more of a hindrance to clients than a benefit and that’s when I take time off. Usually up to a week, 2 tops. This time, I’m looking at months and it’s feeling nerve-wracking.

After Pausing for Reflection...

After reflecting on it these past few weeks, I’m thinking I’ll put my focus into content building, rather than doing client work. That way, I can focus on building a niche site, and when I get back to freelancing, I’ll can use it as a case study of sorts. It feels like I’ll still be working on my core business while working on a future supporting project.

The thinking behind focusing on a niche project rather than client work is partially to experience more incremental wins. I’m one of those who needs to see progress somewhere regularly, not necessarily money.

Getting more done (without having anyone but me to answer to), seeing things progress like pages of mine getting indexed, getting approved for affiliate programs, seeing traffic increase, hopefully getting shares and the like… The small non-financial wins knowing it’s building toward a financial backup for times like these in the future.

I’d love to hear from anyone here who’s experienced something similar - like having to stop work for several months but keep yourself in the game enough to at least keep your spirits up.

More like staying optimistic when you really can’t be working for much of the day, but need to see progress from something.

I feel, it’s too easy to lose motivation and I do not want to slip down that slope.

I think this’ll resonate more with people who have jobs (because freelancers are really employees without the benefits).

If your income dried up and you had 3 months to get back to it, how would you go about it? (and without overwhelming yourself with a massive to-do list).

Curious to read your responses below.

Thanks in advance

Robert.