Freelance is the Future

I have been advocating the freelance lifestyle on this blog for some time. I am genuinely happy with my work as a freelancer and I think a lot of other people would be happy as freelancers. I also advocate freelancing in person and if we meet and talk you'll find out! I wanted to share a few stories about friends who have recently made the transition to freelancing and what their experience has been like. (All names changed to protect the innocent).

Steve

I met Steve in my Thai class in Bangkok. Steve is a web developer and had been working for a web agency in Bangkok for a couple of years. A couple of months ago Steve messaged me. He had just been told he was probably going to be made redundant because the company was bankrupt. On top of that his girlfriend had recently become pregnant so he was understandably nervous! He knew I was a freelancer and wanted to talk to me about what it was like.

We met up for a beer and discussed the freelancing lifestyle, how to get clients and what rates to charge. He was a bit worried about how long it would take for him to ramp up his business as babies are not inclined to wait while their fathers get their finances in order!

I recently met up with Steve again and was delighted to hear that he was happier than he'd ever been at work. In his own words he'll "never go back". Steve had teamed up with his colleague and formed a partnership. They got in touch with all the contacts they had made and found a few clients who wanted to work with them. Steve is now working half the hours that he used to and making the same money. He is also at home to help his girlfriend and he can't wait to spend lots of time with his baby when it arrives.

Paula

Paula and I have been friends since high school. Paula is a graphic designer by day and an artist by night. She worked for years in very high pressure work environments and was always super stressed. Last year she quit her job and decided to start working freelance.  She wanted to earn enough by freelancing 50% of the week that she could afford to spend the other 50% focusing on her art.

I met up with Paula last weekend and she looked happier than I had seen her in a long time. She had used the contacts she made during her salaried career to pick up 2 big businesses as regular clients. These 2 clients pay her well enough that she can work half her time and create art the rest of the time. She is renting a studio where she goes on days that her clients don't have work for her. She seems extremely happy and I am glad to see my friend looking relaxed and healthy.

What's Your Point?

Freelancing is awesome!

In seriousness, I think this is demonstrative of the world we live in now. The opportunities for freelancing are many and the flexibility enables people to have more control over their lives. The 2 examples here were enabled by contacts made during a salaried career, and that is definitely an advantage. That said, contacts of any kind are beneficial. My main takeaway is to focus on talking to people and making more contacts. You never know where your next opportunity may come from.

If you would like to know more about getting started freelancing get in touch.

Freelancers Don't Have Weekends pt 2

I wrote a post last month about never having actual time off as a freelancer. My plan was to try out the Big Rocks principle from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I said I would follow up and let you know how it went. So how did I get on? Have I become a highly effective freelancer?

So, in a nutshell, the plan was for me to take 10 minutes every Friday and schedule the big tasks I need to do for the coming week. The idea is that I would be reminded of the big tasks and focus on getting them done without letting small things; emails, messages, YouTube, whatever, get in the way. How did I do?

I think a solid C+. Did it help? Yes. Was it great? No.

What Did I Do?

My method was to go through the week and block out chunks of time. The chunks were either a) for specific tasks I needed to do or b) chunks allocated to particular clients. I have 3 regular clients at the moment and I gave them chunks that roughly matched the amount of time I thought they would require.

What Went Badly?  :-(

The smart people among you will have already noticed a flaw in my plan. While I had about the right amount of weekly time for each client, the client demands vary on a daily basis. Client A might have a rush job at the start of the week and nothing at the end while Client B is the reverse.  This meant that I was constantly readjusting my plan because Client A had used their allotted time and ran over into the block for Client B or vice versa.

On a couple of occasions I had multiple clients with urgent requests which meant everything went out the window and I just did whatever was needed. One day I had a quiet afternoon and was catching up on some blogs while my calendar was pinging me every so often suggesting that I should be doing client work. I didn't actually have anything to do so this just filled me with a vague unease...not what I wanted from the experiment!

What Went Well?  :-D

When I had a specific task in my calendar it worked out great. The best example is this blog. It usually takes me about an hour to write a post, find images and get it ready. The problem is that this hour is sometimes the hour before it is published!

I blocked out an hour a week to write the blog. Even though,due to client demands, I couldn't always do the blog in the slot I had planned, I would reschedule it to the next available time. The result is that I was regularly reminded to do the blog and it got written with plenty of time before posting. This was a small but significant stress reduction that was also seen on a few other small jobs.

What Will I Do Differently?

The main benefit I saw from this activity was dedicating known amounts of time to specific activities... like writing this post. Things went wrong when I gave chunks of time to vague activities like "9:00 - 11:00: Work on Client A".

My plan is to continue giving chunks of time to specific tasks like the blog. For the more variable things I am going to allocate chunks of time for "Client Work". These chunks of time are going to be dedicated working time but not for any particular client. This should allow me to focus in the times I am supposed to without feeling bad about not doing work for Client A or B or whoever.

I also have recently developed a man crush on CGP Grey:

I love his Hello Internet podcast and his Youtube channel. He is a big advocate of a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. I am currently reading this book and I'm going to see what I can adapt from it. I will follow up in part 3!

How do you manage your time while freelancing? Let me know.

Work for Free!

When starting out as a freelancer it is difficult to decide on what rate to charge. Very often you will not have references to prove your bona fides, repeat clients to rely on or an established name. In that case the only way to compete is on price. You can work for free, but should you?

The video below has been doing the rounds for a while and is intended to dissuade people from doing "spec work". In case you aren't familiar with the term, spec is short for speculative. A business may ask someone to do work for free on the understanding that this is a "foot in the door" and could result in more work in future or gain you exposure.

Spec work generally crops up in creative fields, although I have been asked for spec work and no one has ever described me as a creative! Watch the video and we'll talk more afterwards.

This topic came to me as a result of my new favourite podcast, Hello Internet. As an aside, if you have never heard of it I recommend listening, the two guys on there discuss some really interesting topics. On the most recent episode they had a fascinating discussion about this video and spec work in general. You can listen to it starting at 1:12 on episode 61.

Listening to their discussion helped clarify some thoughts that I have had on the subject. I wrote a post at the start of this blog about how to compete with low cost countries. In that post I said that you should "demonstrate your quality and the right clients at the right rates will come." I still believe that and my career is proving it as my rates continue to climb. However, while I never had to work for free at the start of my career I did work for much, much lower rates than I do now or ever had since my paper round when I was 12 years old. You can see how my hourly rate changed during 2015 in this chart:

When you are starting out as a freelancer you will need to think tactically. You need to honestly and critically assess your skills; what gives you a competitive advantage over others in your field? As a fledgling writer you might come up with the following list:

• Experience in the legal industry
• Internship with a magazine
• Punctual & reliable
• Poem published on a well known website

Those are all great but one thing that will almost certainly be missing from this list is an established brand name or reputation. If you do have one of those then start celebrating; the world is your mollusc and you can feel free to charge whatever you like. If not, then you might add to the list:

• Will work for free

I don't want to sound very cynical but I don't believe the people who made that video did it out of a sense of civic duty. I think they are established professionals who do not want young upstarts to work for free and drive down the value in the market.

I'm not saying that you should do it. I have friends who have done it and had nothing come of it. I also know people who have gained a benefit. If nothing else you should carefully consider it but be aware that it is a gamble. It's up to you whether you choose to roll the dice.

Get in touch if you would like to discuss this more.

Freelancers Don't Have Weekends

Working as a freelancer allows a lot of freedom to create your own schedule. That's great but there is a danger of letting your work take up all of your time. You can end up doing work every day and at all times of day. How can you ensure you have some time to decompress? Do you need a weekend?

One of my favourite things about freelancing is that I don't actually need to work a full time job. I can earn enough money to do everything I want without being trapped working 9-5 every day. Often I do work 8, 9, 10 hours in a day but I don't have to.

I have found though that I work at all hours of the day or 7 days a week without really ever taking a complete day off. I don't work all the time but I do work every day. I'm not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing. Traditional work culture has trained me to believe in a 5 day work week with 2 days off. I have thrown off most of the traditional mode of work so I'm not sure why I still feel like this.

It is sometimes too easy while freelancing to take a long lunch or watch a YouTube video here and there. This can then mean that you have still have work to do at 7pm without having worked all that hard during the day. You still get all of your work done but it feels like you're never truly off the clock.

I have been thinking about this recently and I've decided to try an experiment. When I was working full time I attended a training course on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I really enjoyed the course and there were lots of useful ideas in it but one that really stuck with me is the idea of Big Rocks. Essentially, plan the big tasks that you have to do and everything else will naturally fit around them. If you let the small things lead the way then you'll never get around to the big things. This video demonstrates it really well.

Last Friday I spent 10 minutes marking out time in my calendar for the tasks I need to do. I'm going to try to stick to it even when other things come up. Writing this blog is frequently something that I push aside when client work comes up and I end up doing it at the last minute. However, I marked out an hour from 3-4 today to write this post. I was in the middle of some client work when my calendar notified me that the no9to5 blog session was coming up so I finished what I was doing and changed tasks. Now the post is nearly finished and I can go back to what I was doing.

I'm hoping that doing this will result in me finishing the work I need to do in a reasonable time so I can fully switch off until the next day. I will do a follow up in a month to let you know how the experiment goes. How do you manage your time while freelancing? Let me know.

What is a Reasonable Expectation?

Since starting work as freelancers this is a question Agi and I have been wrestling with. As a freelancer there is a certain amount of paranoia that a client could potentially end your relationship without any notice. You want to keep your clients happy but how far does this go? When a client asks for something should you drop everything else?

When you work in a salaried position there is (usually) a clear delineation between your work and off time. If someone asks for something that you think is unreasonable you can push back and you probably won't get fired (not legal advice!). You can feel secure if for no other reason than firing people in most countries is quite a lot of hassle. One of the downsides of freelancing is that there are no guarantees. Clients can come and go with very little notice.

I wrote a post recently about working while travelling. I mentioned that we rarely take any extended time off work; choosing instead to maximise our travel time by working as we go. We are both very happy with this situation and we keep our clients informed to avoid surprises. This can lead to difficult situations though.

If you are on the way to the airport and you receive a client email with a request. Should you fire up your mobile hotspot and try to sort it there and then? If you get back from dinner and you're tired but you see an email asking for an urgent task. Should you do it then or wait for the morning?

Essentially, where is the line? What can a client reasonably expect? What do you owe to yourself? These are tough questions and I don't have definite answers but I'll give you some of my thoughts.

At the start of my freelance career I had only one client and I was terrified of losing them. I made myself available whenever they wanted and jumped on any emails like a teenager waiting for a text from the hot girl in class. Now that I have grown my empire(!) I feel more confident in myself. I have a few clients and I don't feel so dependent on any individual one.

Lesson the first: Diversify your client base

I have worked with my current clients for a reasonably long time now. We have got to know each other and how we work. I know that they will not ask for something urgently unless it really is urgent. Equally, they know that I can be relied upon to get stuff done so they don't ask for constant updates.

Lesson the second: Develop relationships with your clients

The final thought is that, as a freelancer you are taking control of your life. Most of us do this because we don't want to be chained down to a single location or company for 40 years. I don't think we should exchange one type of chain for another. Only you know what you are comfortable with and you should get to know your own limits and expectations. I frequently work on things late at night or in an airport waiting room because I know that I can take time off during normal work hours if I want to.

Lesson the third: Find the level that you are comfortable with

The final point to take away is that freelancing is a kind of adventure. Most people do it because they don't fit the mould so, by definition, no 2 people's experiences will be the same. Get started, find a work style that you are comfortable with and build from there. Let me know how you're getting on. I love to hear your feedback.