How to Find Time for Personal Work Amid Growing Client Projects

It’s been at least six months since I have worked on any of my personal projects. This is the longest stretch of time in recent memory when I haven’t been able to carve out a day or half a day to go shoot for “myself.”

It really hit me today that my fingers are itching, I just want to pack my camera in my bag with a lens or two and head to the Bronx to finish a project I’ve been photographing for four years.

Instead, I have been working for clients. I’ve produced and directed a series of seven short documentaries, traveled to Guatemala to create custom content for a non-profit, photographed events ranging from the Girls in Tech conference in San Francisco to weddings in Long Island.

I’m not complaining — steady work is not always a given as a freelance photographer. I am in the habit of always saying “yes” to work. Which means when the work comes in I reside in over-extended-ville.

As a result, my post-production delivery time frame suffers. I sleep less. I eat more chocolate and drink coffee from the time I wake up until right before bed — and I am so tired that I can still sleep. And above all, I don’t go out and shoot my own work.

My struggle to find a balance between the work I am personally passionate about and the work that pays my bills is not new. Looking back, it really began 20 years ago when I left my staff position at a newspaper in Taos, New Mexico to become a freelancer. Perhaps not the safest decision, but most of my successes in life have come from being a risk taker. Back then, in order to supplement my photojournalism income, I started my wedding photography business Shoot The Cake. 

My business partner and I specialized in documentary photography for weddings, which was actually a novel idea back then, and so were instantly busy. My plan was that I would do weddings on the side. But as time passed and freelance budgets at publications shrunk, I woke up one day and realized I had slowly slipped into being wedding photographer who did journalism assignments on the side. This was not my plan and I worked diligently to change it. Still the paying work vs. personal work is a tricky problem to solve and I haven’t found the solution.

These are the strategies I’ve tried in the past:

• Every other Friday is my personal workday. But in reality what happens is whatever spillover from M-Th winds up taking precedence and instead of heading out with my trusty camera I’m inside spending the day with Lightroom.
• I give myself a self-imposed deadline to finish the project so that I feel some sort of time pressure to get it done. This sort of works, especially if I want to enter the work in a contest or have the opportunity to show the work. But most times I just keep pushing the deadline farther.

These are the strategies I am going to try next: 

• Make a pact with a fellow photographer that we hold each other accountable to a certain number of days per month that we work on our own photography projects.
• Come up with a reward system. When I finish the project, then I can buy the Canon 35mm lens () I’ve been wanting.
• Sign up for a portfolio review or make an appointment to drop off my book with an editor I haven’t worked with yet — a real finite deadline can work wonders.
• Remind myself that I feel most alive when I am looking through the viewfinder and finding those moments, the magic, and the flow. It is after all this experience that makes it bearable to spend days with Lightroom.

Finding the balance between client work and your own work is so elusive which is why it is one of the questions I pose to all the women I interview in my ALC column Women with Cameras. I have not found the answer. If you have an answer or a strategy that works for you, please let us all know.