The concept of work/life balance is big in the corporate world right now. Employees have grown sick of being asked (sometimes coerced) to give more than a pound of flesh to their employers and employers recognize that they get better work out of employees when those employees are happy, healthy, and can enjoy some family time.

But it’s different for freelancers. We don’t have HR managers reminding us to spend some time with our family. Instead, we have clients who expect their work when they want it, and, we (often) work from home which further blurs the lines of what is work and what is life.

This became a reality for me years ago in my early days as a freelancer. I was giving out my home number as the way for clients to get in touch via telephone. When one client called me on Sunday night – on my birthday – and demanded that I jump onto his “emergency” project right away, I realized that the work/life balance had blurred too much. I got a business number the very next day and gave that out instead.

Of course, telephone isn’t the only problem for freelancers. If you check your email (and we all do), we can unintentionally set expectations about our availability by answering emails on a Saturday night. And when we work around the clock to get a client’s project out the door on time, we might be setting a precedent that we’ll later regret.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be answering your email or burning the midnight oil for a client. We should go the extra mile or two for our clients. We should be as accessible as we can for them. But we should be mindful of the message we’re sending and we need to also draw a line somewhere and not cross it. Here are some ideas to help you:

• Establish an “in the office” time when people can expect you to generally be there. Make it a set time that people know they can call and expect you to answer or email and expect a prompt reply.
• Set the ground rules early about how long people can expect to hear back from you and what your working hours are. People will rarely disrespect those hours if they’re set but they won’t have the same sense of boundaries if you say nothing at all.
• Create separate work and personal emails (or, work and personal folders in your email). Answer the work ones during work hours only.
• Help yourself clarify work/life balance by establishing what you’ll do during work and what you will do during personal time. Facebook might be a good example. If you don’t use it for work, and you want to make sure that you find some work/life balance, save your Facebook for after-hours.

The time you spend away from work can be rewarding for you and for your family… and it can also be a refreshing time to keep your creative juices at the maximum.