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In this guest post, freelancer Piotr Krzyzek shares his secrets of time management when the client is half-way across the world.

Working as a freelancer is a daunting task in and of itself. Having your client on the other side on the world surely does not help. When you are getting ready for bed, your client is only just getting out of bed and beginning their morning routines. What are you supposed to do when you get an e-mail at one in the morning asking you for quick revisions on the project?

Like most people, you do not want to offend your client by making them wait at least 7 hours before waking up and fixing things. The logical course of action for you is to stay up late at night making those changes. Wrong!

As a freelancer you have the power to choose when you do and do not work. You control your work hours. This is probably the hardest step for freelancers, being ‘free’ in the freelancing line of work. In order to be free, you must set your own rules, times and work load and not your clients.

Setting your own work hours and rules is much easier than you might think. In the simplest form, all you have to do is make a To-Do list and only work on that list from 9am to 3pm each day, for example. As a freelancer, your time is very precious and your time is money. So you do not want to waste your time managing time.

The simplest and most effective form of time management is a daily (and weekly) To-Do list. It really is as simple as it sounds. There are plenty of applications, websites and ‘systems’ you can use to help you with this. I recommend a pen and paper, though there are plenty of online solutions as well. One of the most popular is Remember The Milk. It’s also a plugin for Gmail, so you can use both together to help you work out a good schedule.

A daily To-Do list is easy to implement. All you have to do is write down your tasks to do for the day. This can be done the night before, or in the morning before you start your day. On the list you write the tasks, revisions, or projects you would like to get done that day. The order in which you put them on the list does not matter, though as a matter of good practice it’s best to put the ones you would like to finish first on top.

Keeping only a daily To-Do list is not good enough. You also need to keep a weekly To-Do list. This list contains all the projects that are due by the end of the week. If you use a program like Remember The Milk you can spread out the Weekly To-Do list into specific days instead of having one giant weekly list.

Keeping track of your tasks is important, but how to manage the time required for the tasks is even more important. This means that it is far more important to know how much time you can spend on any one given task. For example, if you know that there are 2 small revisions to do today and one bigger project you will have to know much time you spend on the two small revisions. The bigger more important project is your priority, so if the two smaller things are in the way you need to know that you will have to move that work to another day.

You have to organize the tasks of importance to you. If you’re a fast writer then you can, for example, schedule 1 hour for each revision. Though if you are a slow writer or don’t know how long the tasks will take you’ll have to schedule more time. Though if finishing those two smaller projects give you a bigger reward than the bigger project, it’s in your best interest to go those first instead. But it all depends on what is important to you.

Remember, good time management is not hard. All you need is a piece of paper and a pencil to write down the tasks you should do. Then go through the tasks one by one, most important to you first. Also, don’t forget to work by your own time schedule. Your client will understand it’s 3am and you need sleep. The client is just as afraid of losing you as a writer as you are of losing them as a client.

Piotr Krzyzek is a young and energetic entrepreneur who specializes in computers, business and internet marketing. He provides no-BS solutions and loves to get into the details of the problems. He writes about the solutions he find and creates on his blog Piotr Krzyzek dot COM where he writes on finding the best solution to any given task.