Not long ago a newcomer to the world of virtual work asked in a plaintive-sounding voice: “How do I organize my time?”

Great question.

It may not matter what you wear to work, especially if your office is a basement, a bedroom, your garage, or the front seat of your car. You may care a bit more if you’re working out of the café down the street, but that depends on the dress code in your community.

What does matter is that you get your work done. Remember, now that you’re your own boss there’s no one breathing down your neck in that cubicle demanding that report NOW. No more quarterly performance assessments or jockeying for bonuses. You need to motivate yourself to get to work and fulfill whatever you need to do to get paid not matter where you actually do the work.

For the sake of this discussion we’ll presume you left your full-time job with another projects lined up to at least pay the bills, or pulled in funding to build that new business. So, how do you organize your work load?

Note that I didn’t say work day. In virtual company land there really is no such thing. There’s work time and off time. And if you’re wise, you’ll be careful to differentiate them and set aside down time or you’ll go nuts. Pretty soon your work life with merge with your private life and your brain will go to mush.

The ideal is to have a business that makes money while you sleep. One buddy with a going eBay business jokes about nudging his sleepy wife every time he heard the sale bell go off in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, eBay isn’t right for all of us. Besides, not everyone has a product or service suited to the Web.

Many of us in virtual work land have essentially transferred aspects of our former day job to a virtual setting. So Jeff, for example, used to do tech PR in New York City. A few years ago he left his day job, but took a number of accounts with him when he started his own business in a rural Massachusetts community. Or there are international consultants like Alan who made their contacts in grad school and slowly, but surely, built up a small business. When Alan isn’t jetting to far off locales, he loves conducting business on a raft in his pool (at least in the summer).

For these sorts of folks there are no real rules for organizing their time. For them, it’s a matter of balancing personal rhythms and inclinations with the demands of customers or clients.

Let’s say you are a night owl. If you had total freedom, you would sleep until 11 a.m., have a leisurely brunch and saunter into your work zone by 1 p.m. and then push like hell until 10 pm. with some breaks for eating and exercise. In fact, that would be a great schedule for an entrepreneur whose main customer or client is in Asia where many time zones range from 10 to 12 hours ahead of ours. You’d be able to catch your clients during their morning hours every day instead of having to struggle to book that night meeting when you’re really dying to crash in front of the TV.

But what if your clients are in New York? Europe? California? Unless you live on the same time zone, you’ll find that you need to be available at many different times of day or night and under many circumstances. I’ve worked with clients from cafes, from my basement, cars, airports and my kid’s dance recital rehearsal. Nothing like screaming over jazz music. . .

It may sound like I do a lot of running around, but the truth is I maintain a fairly regular 9-to-5 sort of work schedule. I’m usually at my desk by 9 a.m., if not earlier; stop for lunch and errands between 12:30 and 2 p.m. and work many days until about 5 p.m. What’s different about my day is that sometimes I take off for a hike or swim in the afternoon, or take an hour off in the afternoon to be with my daughter. If I feel weary at 4 p.m. – which is often – I take a long break and then work into the night. In fact, it’s 9:36 p.m. as I write these words.

There’s no reason for me to be at my desk between 8 and 9 a.m. I just like it that way. I enjoy bringing my breakfast downstairs and sipping my tea by my computer. I need to read email and sort my life in the morning hours or I feel like I’m playing catch up all day long. And many of my clients are in Europe or the United States right now, so I need to be up on the morning to catch them.

The one constant is that we’re all have the self-discipline to focus on work and accomplish a task. If you need someone to tell you to get to work, either stay in the traditional work world or hire someone to yell at you. But how you organize your time will be up to one person – you.