What's the most time-consuming part of your job as freelance developer?

Finding new leads. When I have job requests coming in it’s all fine, but when I have to chase new jobs and go through multiple rounds of ping-pong messaging with possible customers it becomes very tiring. Ideally, I would be doing this weekly while working on projects, but I haven’t made it a priority.

Getting paid. A lot of the work is trying to get people to complete payment. Sometimes the app is done and handed over and it goes through months of "We'll bank it in next week or tonight."

Sometimes it's a negotiation tactic to try to squeeze a freebie. Say a company commissions 10 training sessions, which by contract is paid after the 10th. They'll rush through 9 sessions in 2019 and never get around to the 10th one, saying that the previously trained team were no longer around and that the new team need some practice to get up to par.

Chasing and suing clients is simply not profitable, exhausting, time consuming. Writing better contracts is time consuming and often that time is not billable. The trick is to filter clients who won't pay, and basically handle marketing in such a way that you don't get these clients. A lot of it is spotting patterns in bad clients and sometimes refusing someone who could potentially be a profitable client just because they could also potentially be a trouble client.

Answering the question "how long or what is the cost to do X thing" only to be later told "don't work on it", is the most unpaid time consuming activity. Sometimes you really don't know if it will take 2 hours or 2 weeks without some investigation.

Dealing with "just a quick small change" from customers.

In terms of “should have been far less time consuming” rather that just “time consuming”:

Unspecified functionality/design:

My clients are often non-technical (not developers) and UI/graphic designers. So there can easily be a lack of understanding and rigorous communication if you don’t take the time to write things down and keep an updated version of that thing as you figure out the unknowns.

Not sure if the most time consuming, but what really pisses me off is how much time I have to spend emailing/calling/etc clients to discuss project details, money, etc that I'd rather spend writing code. That's probably the worst part of freelancing

I have to switch between multiple Slack workspace, repository to communication and work.

Fighting legislators in Sacramento (AB-5)