Hi, I'm Gregory Brown.
My goal is to help software developers get better at what they do, whether they've been at it for five weeks or fifty years.
(he/him)
I recommend over the next year trying to double your rates and cut that time commitment in half, it's not sustainable.
Use as much time as possible between projects to improve skills and build relationships with current and prospective clients, and then little by little replace lower paying engagements with higher paying engagements.
As your profitability increases, start reducing your overall time commitment, and also start increasing the percentage of non-billable time you have available in each work week. Having your billable hours represent no more that 70% of your weekly time commitment is a decent target to shoot for.
Then use the non-billable time to once again, improve your skills, connect with current and prospective and future clients, build out whatever tooling you need to support your own work etc. Once you have time built into your schedule like this you should be able to create a fairly even flow of work, so that you aren't either overwhelmed or in a holding pattern all the time.
It's a bit cheesy in places, but the book Focal Point by Brian Tracy may be relevant and useful to you.
Ebrahim Hasan is a full stack web developer, currently working as a freelancer on freelancer.com, he is a co-owner of a swedish and an Egyptian company.
I recommend over the next year trying to double your rates and cut that time commitment in half, it's not sustainable.
Use as much time as possible between projects to improve skills and build relationships with current and prospective clients, and then little by little replace lower paying engagements with higher paying engagements.
As your profitability increases, start reducing your overall time commitment, and also start increasing the percentage of non-billable time you have available in each work week. Having your billable hours represent no more that 70% of your weekly time commitment is a decent target to shoot for.
Then use the non-billable time to once again, improve your skills, connect with current and prospective and future clients, build out whatever tooling you need to support your own work etc. Once you have time built into your schedule like this you should be able to create a fairly even flow of work, so that you aren't either overwhelmed or in a holding pattern all the time.
It's a bit cheesy in places, but the book Focal Point by Brian Tracy may be relevant and useful to you.
Woow! Great advice! Thank you so much! I will make Sure to apply this! Will also check the book