Do you find yourself running out of time each day? Do your tasks just keep piling up and then you can never seem to catch up with all the things landing into your inbox? You may be suffering from “not enough hours in the day” syndrome. Chances are that you’ve experienced this phenomenon on more than one occasion.

Partly because of the unconventional nature of working from home, freelance writers and other dot com entrepreneurs are probably the most prone to this affliction.

We are able to work at just about any hour of the day, so we almost feel like we should be.

With the wider availability of working hours, freelancers are always on the lookout for more work and more gigs. After all, the more you work, the more you get paid. This is known as the misconception of freedom. With more work piling in, it becomes impossible to keep up.

This problem is exacerbated by the breakneck pace of modern technology. Modern conveniences like email may expedite the communication process with freelance clients and get projects completed in a more efficient manner, but email could be stunting your productivity as well. I know that I leave my Gmail account open all day, and realistically, it serves more as a distraction than anything else.

By constantly trying to catch up with my emails, it becomes far too easy to say that there aren’t enough hours in the day. As the freelance writing projects continue to pile onto my plate, it becomes impossible to ever get to the bottom of the pile.

Just when you think that you’re done, you’ve only just begun.

When you first start out as a freelancer, your biggest stress will be trying to solicit clients. As you get more established, it becomes easier to find more work and this is the kind of slippery slope that leads to burnout. You can be stressed by scrambling to find work, but you also get stressed by having too much work. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties is finding that healthy medium. You know, where you have just the right amount of work.

In the end, you have no one to blame but yourself.

It’s not that there aren’t enough hours in the day. There have always been the same number of hours in the day (let’s not get into an astronomy discussion about the technical inaccuracy of this statement) and people have managed to survive. There are three reasons why you may think you don’t have enough time, and all three of these reasons come back to you.

You could have poor time management skills, not being able to fit your workload into your schedule. You could be distracted from your work, spending too much time playing Internet Reversi and not enough time actually working. Or you could have just over-extended yourself, loading up with more work than you can handle. It doesn’t matter which of these three situations are to blame, because they all point back at you.

Not enough hours in the day? Just take a look in the mirror and you may find the cure.