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Portfolio Career Design

A deliberate mix of part-time roles, clients and projects: an income floor, a weekly shape, invoicing and tax routines, pricing, and regular rebalancing so no strand quietly swallows the rest.

Free · Mac (Apple silicon) and Windows · v1.0.0 · Other platforms

Then open the Marketplace in the app, search for Portfolio Career Design, and click Install. It goes into your own files, and works offline from then on.

What it installs.

1

Pillar

1

Area

50

Projects

196

Starter tasks

🧭 Career Growth

Portfolio Career Design

Designing a working life made of several part-time roles, clients or projects, and keeping them balanced.

  1. Map of every work strand and income source
  2. Two-week time and energy audit across strands
  3. Monthly income floor and cash buffer target
  4. Choosing the shape of your portfolio
  5. One-line introduction that links your strands
  6. Themed weekly calendar with a day per strand
  7. Separate business account and bookkeeping set-up
  8. Standard terms and contract checklist for clients
  9. Conflict of interest and moonlighting clause check
  10. Monday portfolio planning session
  11. Monthly income ledger by strand
  12. Invoicing and late payment routine
  13. Tax set-aside and payment routine
  14. Cross-strand pipeline of next work
  15. Quarterly portfolio balance review
  16. Capacity ceiling and the saying-no rule
  17. Weekly status note to each client or employer
  18. Monthly admin and business maintenance block
  19. End-of-day shutdown note across roles
  20. Pricing day rates, retainers and project fees
  21. Proposals and scopes of work that hold
  22. Focus and switching between different roles
  23. Self-employment registration and tax basics
  24. Turning repeat clients into retainers
  25. Negotiating part-time and fractional role terms
  26. Outsourcing admin to a bookkeeper or assistant
  27. Dropping the lowest-value strand
  28. Raising rates with existing clients
  29. Adding a teaching or training strand
  30. Choosing a legal structure for your freelance work
  31. Insurance cover for a multi-client working life
  32. Productising a service into a fixed package
  33. One calendar and task system for every strand
  34. Limiting dependence on any single client
  35. First-year portfolio retrospective
  36. Year-end accounts and tax return preparation
  37. Moving from a full-time job to a portfolio
  38. A holiday with every client covered
  39. Launching a new strand publicly
  40. Portfolio work fitted around school hours
  41. Protecting studio time in a creative portfolio
  42. Adding a part-time employed anchor role
  43. Building a fractional senior role mix
  44. Lean-month and slow-season plan
  45. Working with clients across time zones
  46. Retirement saving without one employer scheme
  47. Associate network for overflow and cover
  48. Intellectual property and reuse across clients
  49. Map of how your strands feed each other
  50. Five-year portfolio scenarios

Where it starts.

Each project arrives with its purpose, milestones and first tasks written out. Here is how the first three read.

Map of every work strand and income source

People drift into a portfolio one yes at a time and then cannot say how many strands they run or which ones pay. Listing every role, client, retainer, commission and royalty on one page, with what each pays and asks of you, turns a vague busy feeling into something you can design.

First tasks

  • Write down every role, client and recurring commission you have now
  • Pull twelve months of income per strand from bank statements and invoices
  • Note contracted and real hours beside each strand
  • Tag each strand as anchor, growth, steady or fading

Two-week time and energy audit across strands

Income per strand tells half the story; the other half is what each strand costs in hours, travel, admin and mood. Logging two normal weeks in half-hour blocks shows your true hourly return per strand and which work leaves you flat for the rest of the day.

First tasks

  • Set up a simple half-hour time log on paper or a spreadsheet
  • Log every block of work for ten working days, labelled by strand
  • Add admin and travel time to the strand that caused it
  • Divide each strand's income by its real hours for an effective rate
  • Score each strand for energy from one to five

Monthly income floor and cash buffer target

Several smaller incomes rarely arrive in step, so a portfolio needs a known monthly figure below which life gets tight, and a buffer that covers the gaps. Working out your floor from real spending, and a buffer in months of that floor, tells you how much steady income the mix must guarantee before taking risks on the rest.

First tasks

  • Export three months of bank transactions for the household
  • Mark which spending is essential and total it per month
  • Write your monthly income floor after setting aside tax
  • Choose a buffer target in months and note today's balance against it

Make it yours.

Install Portfolio Career Design, then tell Aurum the date you're aiming for. It checks whether the plan fits the weeks you actually have.

Free · Mac (Apple silicon) and Windows · v1.0.0 · Other platforms

Blueprints are general information to help you organise your own work. They are not medical, financial, legal or other professional advice. See the Terms.