How to Triage Your Workload

By Sean Brenner

One of the nice things about being a freelancer is that you get to set your own schedule. Of course, that’s also one of the most dangerous things about freelancing, especially if you’re prone to procrastination: Apart from yourself and your deadlines, there’s nothing to hold you accountable.

The ability to set your schedule well can be the difference between a successful freelancing career and a nightmarish one, and if you’re not used to making schedules or plans, it might be a challenging task. But as overwhelming as it may seem, making an effective schedule is easier than it might look. In this post, I’ll discuss a few tips and tricks for planning out your workload.

Make a Plan

The most important thing you can do to keep your schedule manageable is to create a plan for doing the work. The goal is to have a rough idea of when you’ll be working, for how long, and how you might distribute your work across that period as far in advance as possible while still being prepared for last-minute shakeups or overflow. It’s a careful balancing act, and the way I make it work is by breaking down my projects into uniform pieces. 

Start by considering how much work you can do in a day, then split projects into how many workdays they’ll take you to complete. I write about three thousand words per workday, so if a manuscript is projected to be about that long, I budget a day for it. If it’s half that length or less, I budget multiple projects in a day. And if it’s significantly longer, I break it up over multiple days. 

The goal isn’t to pick a specific day for each project or part of a project, rather, it’s to tally up how many days I’ll need to get the work done. Sometimes, you’ll be able to get an exact number; other times, you’ll have to estimate. In the latter case, always try to overestimate rather than underestimate.

I do this on a monthly basis, and once I’ve gotten a tally, I can plot out how many days I need to work and which days those will be, factoring in holidays, personal time, and the time I need to work on my business. At this stage I can also see whether I’ll have to work an extra day or two or if I’ll have free days available. 

This process also keeps me aware of how much availability I have in a month, making it easier to avoid overbooking myself or to say yes to an extra project. 

It’s pretty much inevitable that you’ll have to work an extra day or two now and again, so you want to avoid packing your schedule too tight. Create space in your schedule for that kind of overflow. For example, I schedule work for Monday through Thursday, so that if I end up needing more time, I have Friday to do it and won’t lose my weekend. 

As you’re plotting out your month, you might find that you have more workdays than you have work to do. If you manage your schedule well, you can do a lot with those “spare” days. You can take them as sick days or days off if need be, or, when possible, you can use them to start next month’s work. If you keep budgeting spare days like that, it makes it much easier to build vacations into your schedule.

Of course, all of this depends on how regular your client work is and how far in advance they assign you work. My current clients all have regular monthly schedules that are easy to plan around, and if you’re in a similar boat, you can safely plan far in advance. This can be important if you’re planning a long stretch of time off. For example, I usually take a long vacation at the end of December, which requires me to do a lot of extra work in advance. I work out a plan for that as early as September, allowing me to spread out the extra work and make full use of any spare days I might have available.

Manage Deadlines

The other key advantage of breaking your work down into modular chunks is that it gives you flexibility from day to day. You don’t have to plan out specific days for all your projects, which allows you to juggle them more efficiently to meet all your deadlines. 

When planning around deadlines, try to focus on how long you’ll have to complete a project rather than on the deadline itself. While some clients might give you all the information you need to complete a project well in advance, others might only give you important pieces of the puzzle on much shorter notice. Smaller windows to complete a project mean that you’ll have fewer options for scheduling that work. As a result, the projects with the smallest amount of time between assignment and deadline are the ones you want to plan out first. 

For example, one of my clients gives me assignments with a one-week deadline, while another client gives me all my assignments for the month at once, with all of them due at month’s end. I prioritize scheduling the first client’s work, while I schedule the second client’s work last, using it to fill in the gaps between work I’m doing for other clients.

Unless there’s no other choice, never schedule work on a project for the day before your deadline. Always try to give yourself at least a 24-hour buffer between project completion and project deadline. That way, if there’s a last-minute shakeup or overflow, you can account for it without it becoming a crisis. 

Be Prepared

Of course, no schedule is perfect, and work has a funny way of blowing up on you, throwing all your careful planning into disarray. But if you schedule your time well, prepare in advance, and work buffers into your schedule, you’ll have a much easier time managing those crises, and your freelancing journey will go a whole lot smoother.