Time management is a vital skill for freelancers and entrepreneurs. But how do you regulate your day when there’s no one to regulate it for you?

Once the euphoria of becoming a freelancer or entrepreneur recedes, certain challenges materialize. One of these is time management—how do you regulate your day when there’s no one to regulate it for you?

Here are a few tips to help you confront the time management challenge:

1.  Acknowledge the Challenge

It’s nice to ditch your boss. But ditching your boss also means ditching the corporate regime they represent. If you’re like most people, that regime was an important source of structure—the daily schedule, hours logging, weekly meetings and reports—that helped turn you into the type of worker who could one day become your own boss. Acknowledging this debt can be difficult, but it is key to acknowledging the time management challenge, which you absolutely must address if you’re going to succeed on your own.

2.  Set and Keep a Schedule

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Try to set and keep a simple schedule. Don’t worry about minute by minute details—just set a time to wake up, a time to work, a time to eat, and a time to quit. This is especially important if you don’t have a project to work on right away and/or you have family or friends who confuse “working for yourself” with “not working.”

3.  Customize Your Schedule for Your Needs

After following a schedule for a little while, customize it for your needs. Tired of working through beautiful summer afternoons? Start the day early. Night owl? Work late and sleep in. Need a mid-day diversion to charge up? Take a nap or schedule some Internet time. The key is to make these customizations official—make them part of the schedule, not deviations from it that reduce your productivity or, even worse, hurt your confidence.

In the end, remember that your schedule is a tool for managing your productivity, not a regression to the corporate mean. Match it properly to your rhythm and it will pay dividends that flow directly back to you. And after all, that’s what being your own boss is all about.