How to Stay Organised as a Freelancer

Clients, deadlines, tax returns, shooting schedules…the list of tasks to do as a freelancer is never-ending and at times it can be intensely stressful. So you better figure out a way of balancing it all without damaging your health and happiness in the process.

My personal life can be a bit chaotic: I’m rarely on time, I try to do too much at once, and I rarely know what I’m doing the next day, let alone next month. However, as a freelancer, I am always early, I know what’s coming up well in advance, and whilst I still might be a bit disorganised on some admin bits, I’ve built in the safety nets to help make sure I never mess up in a big way. Below are some of the ways I have managed to achieve a level of calm organisation in my business life (that is the envy of my personal life).

Banking: Get smart

The one area you cannot afford to mess up (well there’s a few, but an important one) is your finances and preparing everything for your HMRC tax return. It can be a bit confusing, but in general there are four golden rules to help you get organised.

1. Have a separate bank account for your business and personal life. You don’t need to get a business account, you can just have another normal current account, but you have one card for your own life expenses and another for your business expenses. If you can, try to pick a bank where you can also attach receipts, which is usually challenger banks like Monzo or Starling rather than the big established banks, although nowadays most have good enough apps to do this, but crucially, make sure your bank has FSCS protection. This means should a bank go under, you are protected up to £120,000. If you can, pick a bank that has a Make Tax Digital (MTD) application in their roadmap. MTD is a new UK requirement for the self-employed, lucky us, and it will require you to be using accountancy software to do tax returns four times a year. Right now, it is not super clear exactly what the process will look like, but the requirement to use a pre-determined software is a certainty. If your bank can already do this, however, then you save yourself an extra subscription (like two I'll mention in point 2...)
2. Track all your expenses and keep copies for up to five years. You need to have the receipts (digital copies is fine) of all your expenses related to your business. HMRC can come and ask you for proof of those costs for up to five years after the purchase (I have personally had this experience and it’s a pain in the neck) so you want to make sure you have easy access to all of these. Your options range from dedicated software like Quickbooks and Xero to paper trails you keep in a folder. If you go with a bank like Starling then you can just upload the receipts to the transaction itself, which is handy.
3. Track your mileage. You can charge 0.45p per mile for the first 10,000 miles in a tax year, and then 0.25p after those 10,000 miles. Your mileage is a huge tax-saving expense that I have personally been terrible at keeping on top of. I used to use a book to note down the journey, mileage, date, and project it related to, but I would always forget. Now, I use an app called MileIQ, which has helped enormously, although if you are in heavy traffic sometimes it will break one journey into two or three, but otherwise it has made this part infinitely easier!
4. Don’t make any rash choices until you understand it. I.e. don’t get a loan or make your company a Ltd./LLP company or go VAT-registered unless you completely understand what these things are and the responsibilities, cost, risks, and reasons for doing so. Different company structures and payment registrations will change what you pay, how you pay, and when you pay. Corporation tax deadlines and a self-assessment deadline are different, so it is best you exist in a structure you understand and if you want to change, then make sure you fully understand that first. I own a Ltd. company but I was a sole trader for a year or two first and now, five years on, I am tempted to go back to being a sole trader. There is no one correct structure, only what is correct for you.

Define Your Communication Methods

A client reaches out to you via instagram, you start talking through email, you end up having a phone call, a message pops up in your Whatsapp…before you know it, you are searching through all your different channels to find that one key message from four weeks ago, or you are trying to relax and enjoy your evening when a client’s name pops up and it steals your whole evening.

A few years ago, I would have clients calling me at 7pm on a Friday night, despite me very clearly stating my communication preferences and working hours. Nowadays, I have fewer issues with this because I am much fussier about my clients, and so I am able to give my number out with no concern that my boundaries won’t be respected, and on the odd occassion my boundaries aren’t respected, I will unashamedly decline calls if I am ‘off the clock’.

Define your communication methods and protect those methods. If you do not want to be disrupted through Whatsapp, A) don’t add Whatsapp to your computer and B) don’t give a client your phone number. They can always call you via instagram or you can arrange a Zoom. If you absolutely need to share your phone number then set up a business Whatsapp account that can respond with Out-of-Office messages. As much as you can, choose one communication method (ideally email) and stick with it.

I personally hate slack and so have never used it, but I know for many it is a great way to keep communication within work hours as many companies use slack, so it is the instant messenger of choice for clients but still something you can log out of at the end of the day. You can always buy a second SIM for your phone or use an online service like Air Landline that provides a virtual business number but still comes to your phone, so you can know when a client/customer is calling vs a friend, but obviously these methods have cost implications.

Have a Project Management System

It doesn’t matter if you are a wedding photographer, commercial film producer, or a freelance journalist, there are time-consuming and complex tasks on each and every project, and it is important to have a space where you can keep a clear field-of-view on all of the ‘stuff’.

As a filmmaker, every commercial I produce will almost definitely require the following: budgets, storyboards, casting, location scouting, prop/costume purchasing, hiring freelancers, scheduling shoot dates (and backup dates because England weather sucks), overseeing edits and ammends, and an unenjoyable amount of meetings in between that. When I started, I had no real system for keeping on top of all this other than folders on my laptop, which soon spread to folders on a hard drive, which soon exploded into various folders in various hard drives…not ideal.

You need to have a project management system that is:

1. Accessible anywhere in the world (as long as you have your laptop/iPad/phone on you)
2. Has a repeated and clear structure, ideally with a search function, so you can find anything quickly
3. Can either store data or can act as a master file with hyperlinks to places you store data (i.e. links to shared Google Drive Folders)
4. Doesn’t cost the absolute fortune
5. Actually works for your niche; a sales CRM works for sales agents, it probably doesn’t work for you and the features you want.

Now I looked for a long time for a solution, with StudioBinder and ClickUp being the closest things, but recently I stumbled across SuperOkay that seems like something worth exploring. Of course, you can just keep it to email and instead send links through Vimeo (which now has their review function at a cheaper subscription, yay) or frame.io

Find a Valid and Exciting Reason to Prioritise Routine Time at Home

After a year of relentless travel and work in which I found myself saying yes to client schedules without even countering with my own preferences, I found a valid and exciting reason to make sure I was home on a regular and reliable basis one night a week. In 2019, I signed up to a British Sign Language evening class and promised myself that no matter what, I would not sacrifice this for a client request.

As it turned out, every client I had was fully understanding and always happy to find different dates if I said I was unavailable (I didn’t always tell the clients why but I did say I was unavailable for anything that would stop me being home on a Tuesday evening). Moreover, any new clients had this information from the get-go and so it was an understood term from the beginning.

As a result, I found myself happier, healthier, and more confident. It improved my ability to communicate with clients and having that head-space to focus on myself once a week meant I also felt more organised, able to structure my workload around a consistent pattern.

Best of all though, this evening course directly kick-started my journey into adult-education and D/deaf awareness, which in turn led to the idea behind Green Grass, which led to my BFI commission. So prioritising yourself, in my experience at least, ends up progressing your career just as much as those commercial projects you bend over backwards for. In fact, more.

Make Your Calendar a Non-Negotiable

Once your business gets going as a freelancer, you will find yourself trying to balance multiple clients, projects, and deadlines all at the same time. When I started freelancing I didn’t really use a digital calendar in the same way I do now, which is to say that these days, my calendar is my non-negotiable.

If it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t exist. Put it in the calendar.

As soon as a date is suggested for anything, even if it’s not a pencilled-date, it’s someone throwing some dates out, mark it in. You can always confirm dates later, but if you don’t put something in and then you miss a key date that your client thought was agreed, you have an awkward conversation on your hands.

My personal calendar of choice is Notion calendar because it links my two worlds together; my personal dates I put into my google calendar, and then the work commitments I put into my Notion project management system. Notion calendar to me is like my master calendar, my absolute fail-safe as a freelancer.

Within your calendar though, you should also put recovery dates in. If you know you have a busy period ahead, block out a weekend for you to recover. It is so easy as a freelancer to go-go-go and put yourself into a burn-out state. I have done this far too many times and the consequences tend to be to your health and personal life. In a nutshell, it’s not worth it.

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