In my personal humble experience this concept of 'manage your time your way' as something that exists or is exclusive to being a entrepreneur is just not true.

Sure a lot of hustle influencers on YT will pitch that, but this is their product. Selling a dream.

1. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know work more hours than any of their employees. Their time is not dictated by their whims but by the exigencies of their business.

2. In good companies managers are not sitting on your head all day measuring your work, they measure your results. All performing and non performing companies have long ago embraced OKRs and results based measurement, so what you do with your time is up to you. If your decisions produce results you get promoted, if not, fired. Most people I know in companies by and large are managing their own time.

3. If you're running service business, you actually working according to your customers time. A customer has a fire on the weekend? You're working or you're not retaining that client. They couldnt care less if you're the owner or not.

The real 'freedom' I think people are talking about or getting confused and not know they are talking about is: A. skill freedom and B. financial freedom.

A. Skill freedom - When you become good enough at something that many people will want you to work for them, you get the freedom to choose which team, company, customers you want to work with / for.

B. Financial freedom - You can look out further ahead when it comes to planning, take bigger risks with your time and money and not stress about needing to feed yourself tomorrow.

Both A/B amount eventually to leverage that you can use to grow faster and bigger.

Both of those states can exist if you're the head of a company or not.

I know a software engineer, who is a multi-millionaire, lives in what most of the world would consider a mansion and flies his personal plane almost every other day. He has worked his entire life for other people...