Speaker 1: you are an octopus as a freelancer. You're juggling a lot of things, a whole lot of clients, a whole lot of projects, a whole lot of tasks, your hands are everywhere. And if you don't have good systems in place as you sign more and more clients as a freelancer, pure, unadulterated, blood-curdling chaos will ensue. And after five years of freelancing 40 plus freelance clients and juggling sometimes five to 10 clients at a time, I have learned the do's and don'ts of managing your time and multiple clients as a freelancer at the same time. So let's talk through the five non-negotiables you need to put in place as a freelancer in this video so that you don't want to cry yourself to sleep every single night. Hey, my name is Daiya, freelancer, digital business manager, most recently entrepreneur. And as always, you can find sections on the play bar below. If you want to skip to a certain part of the video, your time is precious. Take what you need. If you want to watch this on two legs, please feel free to do so. Okay, let's dive in. First things first, you need your boundaries. These are your ride or dies as a freelancer. If you haven't already watched my video on the four types of boundaries you have to have, have to have. These are non-negotiable four types of boundaries you have to have. I don't want to hear it. No excuses. You need these boundaries written down front and centered, ideally tattooed on your body so you never forget or compromise on them. Without boundaries, freelancing will not be sustainable in any shape or form and will a hundred percent guaranteed turn into a nightmare faster than you can say, why am I working at 11, 23 PM on a Saturday? True story. You and your clients need to know when you work, how you work, your time off, your turnaround times, your communication preferences, all that good stuff. And if you have no clue what I'm talking about, when I say the word boundaries, I'm scared for you. You need to watch that video. I mean it. I'm giving you my sternest, sternest look right now. All right. So now we have our boundary foundations. Next step. Arguably the most important aspect to managing multiple clients as a freelancer is your headquarters. Your HQ is your Holy grail. Your HQ is your overview spot. It's where you see the overview of everything going on for each client. The most important thing about HQ as a freelancer is you need to feed everything into this one place. That's why we call it the HQ because everything goes to HQ. All input flows into your HQ. Every single task to do project goes into HQ for each client. When a client mentioned something that needs to get done on call immediately goes into HQ. When a client sends you an email with a random task straight into HQ, when you are tasked with a project, all the subtasks within that project that have to get done go straight into HQ. Then from your HQ, it gets either put into your weekly plan or your calendar with a time or date when this thing needs to be done, or it stays in your HQ until it's ready to be moved into your plan. At any given time and place, your to-dos should be in your HQ or in a plan or they should be done. Those are the only options. They cannot be anywhere else. Okay. And your HQ can really be anything. It can look like anything you want it to. You can use any tools. You can use Notion, Trello, Asana, Basecamp. The tool doesn't really matter. How you use it is what matters. You need to honor this HQ. Respect it. Cherish it. Everything gets dumped here. Nothing lives in your head ever, right? I don't ever want to hear, I don't need to write this down. I'll remember it. No, you won't. I speak from firsthand, way too many firsthand experiences. We don't want all of our to-dos spread out on a ton of different post-its, tons of different notes on paper, in a journal, in a diary, in your brain. We don't want all of this chaos. This is how we forget things. This is how we don't trust that we're remembering everything. We want everything to funnel into one place. Respect the HQ. Worship the HQ. I swear this will also give you the biggest sense of relief knowing that everything you need to do and remember is in this one spot and that you aren't forgetting anything by chance. Get into the habit of flowing everything into the HQ. And you know what? The HQ doesn't have to be fancy either in terms of layout. Here's my HQ for the first few years of freelancing. It was literally just a notes document with each client listed out and a list of what I needed to do for each client. That's all it was. It was not fancy. It was not some secret productivity hack or strategy. None of that. It doesn't need to be that. It just needs to be one location that we respect that has everything. The HQ. And essentially what I did was I duplicated my HQ every single week. I ticked the to-do's off every week and then I carried everything not ticked off into the next week. If you haven't watched my video about weekly planning for freelancers using Notion as well, I have an HQ in that free Notion template that I include in that video. And you can use that to plan your weeks as well. So that's another option. Or of course you can build your own if you so wish to. The next thing is managing your calendar. I'll be making a whole video on calendar setup and calendar management and organization as a freelancer. But my three biggest tips when it comes to calendar management is time block aka block two to three hours on your calendar for each client at a time. Don't switch between all your clients constantly. This context switching where you're like pulling yourself in and out of businesses is very very time and energy inefficient which we are not about. So batch your time so you can actually focus. That might look like you know Monday's 10 a.m to noon is reserved for client one. Noon to 1 p.m is for client two. 1 p.m to 3 p.m is client three. And then 3 p.m to 5 p.m is admin or something like that. Just make sure you're blocking out those times. Another tip I have is to add breaks and buffer times into your calendar. Do not jam pack your schedule. That is completely unrealistic. You are human. You need breaks. Pad your calendar so you have a bit of buffer time as well in case things take longer than anticipated, right? Sometimes they just do. And if they don't then you'll have a bit of extra free time and feel really great about yourself because you got things done ahead of time. So that's a win-win. The next tip is to set reminders. If you have important time sensitive or urgent things, create reminders and add deadlines into your calendar to make sure you have an additional layer of safety so nothing truly falls through the cracks. If a client has a launch email that needs to go out at 9 a.m tomorrow, I would make myself a calendar task or reminder to do it the day before and a reminder at 8 a.m to double check it again tomorrow. Done. Easy. Now it's out of my brain. Really a big part of my planning and organization philosophy is I don't want anything to live in my brain because when it lives in my brain it takes up a lot of mental real estate and I have to remember it and keep track of it and I'm always like, don't forget those three things you have to do. Don't forget those three things. It doesn't need to be there, right? It doesn't need to be in your mind. We want it to all flow into one place so that we can get that good overview and know and trust this place to have everything we need to remember. One essential thing for your HQ is it has to be actionable one way or another. We don't just want this to be a list where things go to die and never be seen again. We want to make sure that in some way we are assigning due dates to them, we're making them actionable, we're putting them on our calendar, transferring them onto our calendar, something to ensure that these things are actually going to be ticked off and completed. So whether that looks like your HQ is in something like a sauna, trello, base camp, where you can assign due dates and tick things off like a pretty standard project management tool, or in your notes document you ensure that you have little circles to tick things off and you can assign due dates to every single task, whatever it is, just make sure that your HQ has some way shape or form to make all of these tasks actionable and ensure that there is a time and date context to them so that things are actually being moved through the pipeline and not just sitting on this list for the end time. My next tip when it comes to managing clients is to track your time. This is really important. You need to have clarity on your time because your time is money even if you are not charging hourly. Track your time to find out how your time is spread between clients and if it correlates with the bread that you're making per client. I recommend toggle but there are loads of time tracker tools out there. Tracking your time also really helps with something very important which is helping you be realistic about what you can actually handle and I know it's so tempting especially in the beginning as a freelancer to just say yes to every single client flashing paper. You need to know time-wise what you can realistically handle. Sometimes I talk to people who are completely overwhelmed and they're like, oh my gosh, how do you manage so many clients like blah blah blah and we're like going through the organizational system and it comes out that they just signed on too much work. You know sometimes you don't really realize you've signed on 60 hours of work until you track your time and you're like, well if it isn't the consequences of my own actions. So do not overbook yourself. That's not fair to yourself. It's not fair to your clients. So cap your hours at the top. Maybe that is 20 hours a week for you or 30 or 40 whatever you can realistically handle based on where you are in life in your situation. It doesn't really matter. Just make sure you aren't signing on too much work because that is setting yourself up for freelancing not just failure but disaster. So track your time, figure out where your time is going so that you have clarity on that and then you can make adjustments according to if a client's taking up too much time and they're not paying you what makes sense for your time allocation then you can adjust that, raise rates, stuff like that. If you have too much work maybe you drop the client that's lowest on your priority list but if you don't have that clarity on where your time is going you can't make any of those adjustments. So start tracking your time now even if you just have one client. Track your time. The next thing that's super important is creating communication guidelines. I would say 80% of the time a lack or unclear communication is the cause of drama in client relationships. I have worked with dozens and dozens and dozens of incredible freelancers but still I would say communication is the number one thing most freelancers can and should work on. So to manage multiple clients properly it's not just what's going on on your end that you're getting everything done and you're super organized and you're like super planning and everything like that. It's also making sure your multiple clients feel prioritized, taken care of, that they feel transparency in your process of what's going on. So you have to come up with communication guidelines for every single client as a freelancer. And yeah this is useful for you but it's also something you can set as an expectation with your client up front and make sure that they're happy with so that that's just a big perk of working with you. One of those soft skills that they will brag about to all their other friends. So communication guidelines should include things like how you will communicate, right? Which platform? Slack, email, zoom, and how often you will communicate. Weekly, monthly, daily, and you might also want to consider the type of communication. So things like you know daily check-ins. Is it a status update? Is it a report of some kind? Maybe you're a social media manager, you create reports. What does that type of communication look like? Is it going to be a call where you chat things through? Do you just send them via text something on Slack to let them know what you've worked on? So keep those things in mind. Set those expectations up front so the client also knows what to expect and you will be so organized and your multiple clients will be so excited because they will always know that they have that regular check-in point with you. Then don't forget to follow the guidelines you set, right? Add these communication checkpoints into your to-do list, into your HQ, like send daily updates to client two or book in monthly check-in with client four. Bing, bam, boom. Clients feel good about how often they're hearing from you. You feel good about keeping everyone up to date. Now you have a choice. If you are struggling with your calendar and time, watch this video and get a free Notion template too. Or if you're like, wait, hold up, Daya. Boundaries? What are those? Click this. As always, thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next one. Okay, bye.