Freelancing, for all its merits—flexibility, autonomy, the lack of colleagues loudly microwaving fish—brings with it a particular set of challenges. Chief among them: staying productive when no one is watching. Below are seven tips we’ve picked up over the years of being very professionally unsupervised.
1. Work somewhere that isn’t awful
There’s a certain romantic idea of working from a hammock in Bali or a coffee shop in Shoreditch with a flat white and artisan Wi-Fi. That’s fine, if your idea of productivity includes mild sunstroke or being asked if you’re “still using this seat” every 40 minutes.
What you actually need is a workspace that feels like you take your work seriously. That doesn’t mean signing a 10-year lease on a gray box. Instead, high quality serviced offices offer something halfway between the solitude of your spare room and the chaos of communal caffeine-hubs. Quiet, professional, and—crucially—free of the smell of burnt toast.
2. Keep office hours, loosely
One of the early mistakes freelancers make is assuming they can work “whenever”. It’s a seductive idea, right until you find yourself answering emails at 11:52 pm while eating cereal over the sink.
Set working hours. Not because you want to replicate corporate life, but because structure is the thing that keeps productivity from dissolving into well-intentioned procrastination. Start at roughly the same time each day. Stop at a reasonable hour. Let your brain switch off. There’s no award for sending a client draft edits at midnight, and if there were, it wouldn’t be worth winning.
3. Lists are good, tyranny is not
To-do lists are essential. They keep things from slipping between the mental cracks. But once your list starts to resemble a manifesto or a hostage note, you’ve gone too far.
Be realistic. Five meaningful tasks are better than twenty that you’ll feel bad about not doing. We’ve all built beautiful, color-coded productivity systems that collapsed under the weight of their own ambition. Aim for usefulness, not perfection.
4. Breaks are work-adjacent
Taking breaks is not slacking off. We used to think that, until we found ourselves trying to solve a copywriting brief with a brain that had the texture of overcooked pasta.
Get up. Go outside. Drink something that isn’t coffee. A proper break, not the kind where you “just check Twitter” and somehow lose 40 minutes and all remaining respect for humanity.
Your brain is part of the team. Treat it like you would a colleague you actually like.
5. Know when to stop tweaking
The temptation to polish your work until it gleams can be strong. Especially when no one’s telling you to stop. But perfectionism is just procrastination in a nicer outfit.
Set limits. One draft, two rounds of revisions, then send it. The world doesn’t need a thirteenth version of your client’s newsletter header. It needs it done. You’re not being paid to contemplate the metaphysical implications of comma placement.
6. Say no, sometimes even to money
It’s easy to say yes to everything when you’re freelancing, because the next project always feels like it might not come. But some jobs are just expensive ways to waste your time.
The bad-fit client. The scope-creep marathon. The project that pays well but eats your soul by the teaspoon. If you say yes to everything, you leave no space for the work that actually matters. Choose wisely. Your calendar is not an all-you-can-eat buffet.
7. Systems are better than willpower
Motivation is a flaky co-worker. Sometimes it shows up late and spills coffee on everything. That’s why systems matter more than moods.
Automate what you can. Templates, invoices, email replies. Schedule your work in blocks that match your natural rhythms—deep work in the morning, admin in the afternoon, despair in the late evening if you must. The less you leave up to chance or willpower, the more you’ll get done with your sanity intact.
Being your own boss sounds glamorous until you realize that you’re also your own intern, manager, HR department, and janitor. Productivity, then, becomes less about hacks and more about habits. Sustainable ones. Ones that don’t require a new app, a color-coded bullet journal, or a life coach named Brent.
Just a bit of consistency. A decent chair. And maybe, if you’re lucky, the occasional high quality serviced office that doesn’t smell like yesterday’s soup.