This is a guest post by Anna Burgess Yang, a freelance content marketer, journalist, and self-proclaimed workflow geek.

You probably entered freelance life excited about the work you can produce for clients. You have creative control and the ultimate flexibility with your schedule, two very appealing factors of freelance life.

But, freelancing involves much more than client work. Too often, new freelancers aren’t aware of the “business side” of running a one-person operation. You’re essentially also sales, marketing, and finance — all wrapped up into one.

It can quickly feel overwhelming, especially if you treat the business side of your freelance life as an afterthought. Instead, you should set aside time in your week to tackle all of the business tasks that will need your attention. Here are a few things you can do weekly to balance your deliverables and business tasks.

Use calendar time blocking

If you schedule time to do your business tasks, it’s like an appointment with yourself. This does two things: 1) creates a reminder that you need to set aside time for your admin work and 2) encourages you to do the task in one sitting rather than pushing it out and letting it slip from your to-do list.

Some ideas for tasks you can calendar block for:

• Sending invoices (and follow up if needed)
• Planning your social calendar
• Maintaining your online portfolio
• Managing your finances (budget or expenses)
• Building your network, engaging on social or sending cold emails

The length and frequency of these tasks will vary, depending on the type of work you do. If you’re trying to drum up new business, you may want to send cold emails two or three times per week, for half an hour each time. Some freelancers only invoice monthly, others may send invoices every week.

When scheduling your admin tasks into your calendar, take into consideration time of day and the amount of energy you have. A lot of the business tasks will be less “brain intensive” than your client work, so save your peak performance time for your clients and schedule admin work at a time of day when you can simply execute on those more tedious tasks.

Tips to make the most of time blocking

Client work can often be unpredictable, and it might be tempting to shift your calendar around or ignore the time you’ve set aside for business tasks when a client needs you.

Doing this occasionally won’t have much of an impact, but if you’re constantly pushing aside your business tasks in favor of client work, you’ll find yourself working long hours or weekends to make up that time. Or, you’ll find that your business will suffer because you don’t have a good pipeline or your finances are a mess.

There are a few ways you can manage your calendar to help you stay committed to the time you’ve set aside for business tasks.

Color-code your calendar

You may find that having a visual distinction between your calendar appointments for admin work and other client meetings is helpful. Having your business tasks in RED might remind you that you shouldn’t move that block of time.

Protect your free/busy time

If you’re trying to schedule a lot of meetings with clients (especially using a calendar assistant like Calendly), you need to think about how much you want to protect your blocks of time. You can control this using the free/busy option on Google Calendar. Letting people consistently schedule over your admin time defeats the purpose of adding that time to your calendar.

Set aside a larger block of time

If the idea of setting aside small amounts of time each day or week feels too disruptive, you could also block off a larger chunk of time and do several business tasks. Monday mornings or Friday afternoons are good — either kicking into gear for the week or winding down. Set aside two or three hours and knock out everything on your list.

The same would be true for anything you need to do monthly. Pick one day per month and devote half a day (or whatever you need) to your monthly work.

Use an AI-powered calendar assistant

Setting recurring appointments on your calendar can be tricky if you’re juggling a lot of meetings. You may feel that you have to constantly move your calendar blocks around to accommodate client work.

An AI-powered calendar assistant can take care of this for you. When a client schedules a meeting during one of your scheduled blocks for a business task, the calendar assistant will “move” your business task to the next available time on your calendar. Reclaim and Motion are two options for calendar management.

Factor your non-paying work into your pricing & capacity

Scheduling time for your business tasks helps you with another challenge that many freelancers face: your pricing. When you’re figuring out pricing, you want to factor in the time you spend on your business as a whole, not just your client work. Having recurring blocks of time on your calendar shows you how much time you spend on this work and helps you better understand your business as a whole.

It can also help you better understand your true working capacity. You may find that as your business grows, you actually need more time for admin tasks. Understanding your own capacity will help prevent burn-out and keep you thriving as a small business owner.

Over time, you’ll need to continue adjusting how you handle admin tasks. You may need to spend less time prospecting new clients as you build your business or more time sending invoices as the work increases. Or you may need to change the time of day or frequency. Re-evaluate your blocks of time every few months to ensure you’re still making the best use of your time.