In my last post I observed that if you’ve never been a freelancer before, the mindset of making every hour count takes practice.

A few longtime freelancers I know couldn’t believe I didn’t know that.  But one acquaintance wondered what was so hard about it in that “what’s the big deal” tone that close friends use to tick you off.

In turn, I asked him why he would ask me that, since to my knowledge he had never been a freelancer. His answer went something like,

Dude, didn’t you ever have something come up and have to work from home? Whenever I do it it’s great. I get so much done, nobody interrupts me. I would do it all the time if I could.

Of course there were times over the years when I had to work from home. But comparing occasional days at home to full-time freelancing is like saying you understand how hard parenting is because you babysat your crazy niece for three hours.

Dude, it is so not the same thing.

When you have that stray day at home, you’re kicking back in your Snoopy sweatpants and celebrating the absence of a structure that you are returning to tomorrow.

My first weeks as a freelancer felt like a celebration, until I realized that in the absence of my former workplace routines and interruptions, other routines and interruptions — unproductive ones — were taking their place. Here are five things I learned the hard way this past year.

Stop doing the damn chores.

As I spent more time at home I felt a greater obligation to do the laundry and plan good meals because I thought it was the least I could do for my wife, who works full time, and I didn’t want her or my kids coming home to a dirty house. And then one day while I was folding clothes for what seemed like forever, a phrase sprang to mind that has become my mantra:

This is not the best use of your time.

Once I explained to my family why housework might have to wait or why we were introducing Sandwich Night and Pancake Night into the dinner rotation, they didn’t fault me for it. In fact, I realized I was the only one who had the expectation that I had to keep up the housework just because I was home.

Only check your e-mail at certain times.

There was moment a few months ago when I was responding to one e-mail on my desktop while checking several others on my Blackberry and it dawned on me: You’ve been doing this all freaking morning. Chronic emailing is an issue for workers outside the cloud, too, but if you’re getting paid by the hour inside the cloud, it’s a big issue.

Just because an e-mail is actionable, you don’t have to act on it on the second you receive it. Everybody’s got a question or wants to be reminded about something and virtually all of it can wait for times you designate. Set aside an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon to return all messages and phone calls.

Over time, try to cut back each “message block” to 45 minutes or a half hour. As with the chores, explain to your contacts and loved ones that this is how it’s going to have to be from now on. They’ll understand.

Get used to working all the time, especially if you’re a parent.

A fellow parent who has been freelancing longer than I have made this point over lunch a few weeks ago. We were talking about how much it sucks having to do work while your kids are in need of your attention. That’s why you have to resist the urge to work when you have young kids at home, especially during those precious hours between 5 and 8pm when you desperately wish you could be working.

Get used to the idea that while your kids are sleeping or out of the house, you need to be working all the time.

Reward yourself with breaks that reinforce your deadlines.

Of course you do need to give yourself a break every now and then, otherwise you won’t be able to get new time management tips over lunch. The best time to schedule your breaks? Immediately following your deadlines.

The commitments will seem inconvenient while you’re slouching toward the finish line, but the breaks will keep you on track and inspire you to finish on time.

Log your time.

I was never a lawyer or advertising type, so logging my time was never second-nature. And in some workplaces, a request to log and justify your time feels like an affront, secondary only to the flat out question made famous by the movie “Office Space,

“What would you say you do here?

As a freelancer you need to ask yourself that question every hour.

Solvate requires Talent to log their time with details about how they spend it. It’s something I wish I had been doing since my first day of freelancing, even just for my own purposes, so I’d be able to say just what it was I do here every day.

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Paul Eisenberg has more than a decade of experience as a writer and editor at places like Random House and Fox News Channel.

Paul is an editor, writer, and community manager who can:

• report and blog about travel, leisure, and lifestyle topics
• write new brand language and make existing copy consistent with the brand
• edit and rewrite copy quickly
• monitor, evaluate, and edit user-generated content
• write product reviews

Want to work with Paul on demand? Contact delegate@solvate.com.