What Melissa, Virginia and Kathy said. Also, it's worth thinking specifically about how flexible you are prepared to be accommodating wide time zone ranges and hair-trigger client schedules. Either one or the other is often not a problem at all but when they converge unexpectedly, it can be unnerving. It's not unusual for clients to exhibit wait-and-hurry-up pacing. Sometimes they've been cooling their heels waiting for some internal logjam to clear and when it does, they charge out of the gate, guns blazing. (I have a bet with myself about cramming metaphors into sentences.) Sometimes they're just disorganized.
If you want to maximize your opportunities no matter what, then you have to be sure you see all incoming messages promptly and are prepared to respond without delay.And you have to do it all the time, or it's not worth it. If that isn't how you roll, then figure out what your boundaries are re. how fast you respond, what kind of reponse time you need from clients, and more broadly, how you block and plan your time each day, each week, each month. I've passed on several attractive projects in recent months because they had--or smelled like they had--breakneck timelines and I didn't want to create fire drills for myself and risk undermining teh quality of work I already had in hand.
If you were running a brick and mortar business with employees, you'd have to decide what hours to be open and how to allocate staff resources. Just do the same process with your freelance business. At least you know your employee won't give you any backtalk.
