Actually, there are elements of the freelance life in existing courses: I’ve been booked to talk to students about writing for a living. But The Freelancer website’s Danielle Corcione has written a funny, incisive and rather smart prospectus for a proper course. It begins with a module on Self-Care for Emotionally Unstable Writers before it goes into practical issues of money.
Have a read. By the end, you’d sign up for this course if she ever really ran it.
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You work for yourself You do. I don’t care if you report to a manager and you turn up every day to the Acme factory line, you work for yourself. Act like you do because it will help your productivity – and act like you do work for yourself because you do work for yourself.
The good thing about fulltime employment – I’m guessing here because I’m freelance and haven’t had one fulltime post in 20 years – is that you do get to relax a bit. Don’t. You’re there to work and you are there to learn, to get value out of your company and be of value to it.
Nobody employs you because they’re nice. Hopefully they are but you earned your job there and it is costing them. A rule of thumb is that your salary is about half what it costs a company to employ you. (On top of the money you take home there is that much again the cost of hiring and tax and insurance and health and providing the equipment you need to do your job. The figure falls down the more you get paid but on average, roughly, kinda, that’s the sum we’re talking about.)
If you’ve done enough today to make you a bargain for them, then barring calamitous company misfortunes, your job is safe.
What I’m concerned about is how much you’ve got from the company. Firms don’t owe you anything but your salary and presumably they’re paying you that. But is what you’re doing valuable to you? Are you enjoying it and is it stretching you, growing you? We are not in a world where you can just walk out of a job if it isn’t, but you can look to see if it is and you can change things if it ain’t.
Don’t wait to be told what to do by a manager. Do what you’re there for and what you know how to do, then look for more. They’ll love you for all those words like initiative and discipline but you’ll love it for how it makes your job more interesting.
Plus, taking charge of what you do at your job helps you take charge of your career. And remember, you work for yourself. I’ve mentioned this. You’re just choosing to work with this firm for now. You have to keep earning your place there but the firm needs to keep earning its place having you.
This is all on my mind because I read some article saying that employees today need much more reassurance and appraisals than they did before. It’s on my mind because I had to make a fairly big business purchase decision and I realised that after 20 years I am still looking for permission from someone to do what I need to do.
That’s the curse of being a writer, though: we secretly believe someone is going to come along and stop us.
From The Onion:
CHICAGO—After listing off a litany of reasons why he cannot stand his current job, local 27-year-old Don Rutland told reporters Friday that he just needs to power through another day of not being broke and unemployed. “It’s so unbearable right now, but I’m just going to buckle down and make it to the end of the day,” said the man who is not in the midst of an agonizing nine-month job search and can pay all of his bills on time with the money from the paycheck he receives every other week.
Read the full piece.
Contently has a good piece by Marianne Hayes about what it’s like when you have a long-standing freelance job abruptly end.
Within the last couple of months, I’ve had two steady, decent-paying jobs fall through. One was a regular copywriting gig for a medium-sized company; the other was with a well-established news site. Together, these projects were netting close to $2,000 per month. When they came to a grinding halt, I was left scrambling to make up the difference.
Overcoming this hurdle got me thinking about the steps I wish I’d taken to prevent the panic that comes with unexpectedly losing work.
3 Things I Learned from Unexpectedly Losing a Gig – Marianne Hayes, Contently (19 December 2014)
Read the full piece for her three tips but I’ll tell you now, it’s number 2 that’s going to save your neck: “Diversify your client list”.
I just liked this: it’s a pragmatic approach to steadily improving the quality and the quantity of work you get as a freelancer. I’ve been lurching about a lot lately, taking on fun things because they were fun and ignoring that they wouldn’t pay off until next year, so I need to balance that out with shorter term things. This article won’t solve the world, but it’s a good start.
Here’s a simple example from it about the scary part of asking for more money:
Approach your renegotiation one of two ways: either quantify how your workload has increased or how you’ve become more valuable to the client (if you’ve transitioned from an occasional writer to a regular contributor, for example), or simply say, “As we approach the next calendar year, I’m having conversations with all of my clients about my rates.”
Read Dieker’s full piece.
I read this ten seconds ago and rush to bring it to you. I’ll be off now trying this out for myself, will you join me? It’s an online hourly rate calculator for freelancers. Contently just covered it, saying in part:
Many people assume figuring out what your hourly rate should be is a simple task. If you’re a freelancer who wants to make $30,000 a year, just figure out how many hours you work per year and divide, right? Not quite. And as any veteran freelancer will tell you, calculating desired rates requires a much more complicated equation.
Basically, before you know thy employer, you must know thyself. BeeWits, a project management software company, wants to help you with that process, and the company’s new rates calculator is straight out of a freelancer’s dream.
Press “Calculate My Hourly Rate” and presto! Your rate, down to the cent, pops up. It would be great to have an explanation of the calculator’s exact formula, for transparency’s sake. And we’d also love if the calculator could save your numbers to refer back to in the future. But if you’re looking for a thorough tool that can take care of some multi-variable accounting, this is perfect.
The Freelance Rates Calculator We’ve All Been Waiting For – Gabe Rosenberg, Contently (20 May 2015
Read the full piece for their take on it and then use the calculator itself online.
There’s an interesting piece on Contently about coping with deadlines and this is my favourite one:
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. It’s not just a funny observation; it’s called Parkinson’s Law. If you’ve felt unproductive or if you want to increase your output, move your deadlines up. That’s right, giving yourself less time could actually make you more productive.
According to a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, deadlines set near the present encouraged people to get started on their work, while deadlines set further in the future (e.g., early next month, early next year) encouraged procrastination.
Instead of setting your deadline for next Monday, try moving it up to this Friday. You may find yourself more compelled to work throughout the week. If you’re used to catching up with work on weekends to meet a Monday deadline, moving your deadlines up to Friday could mean finally getting to relax on Sunday.
And you don’t necessarily need to tell your editor about the accelerated deadline for it to be effective. It might sound counterintuitive, but shorter deadlines could also clear your head and help you think straight.
5 Ways to Use Deadlines to Your Advantage – Herbert Lui, Contently (25 February 2015)
Read the full piece for four more ideas.
Whatever. I give up. It’s as if we’ve reached saturation point on articles that say writers working from home should pretend they have a real 9-5 office job and instead now we’re embarking on a round of articles saying they shouldn’t. Here’s a shouldn’t:
I polled some of my freelance friends to find out what rules they commonly break. Here’s what came up again and again:
“Work on a schedule, just like you would at a regular job. ”
No thanks, said writer Christine Hennebury: “I don’t set regular hours. I don’t set aside chunks of time. And I don’t turn off my work at a specific time. The whole point of freelancing and working from home is to blend your work and home life together a bit better.” Instead, Hennebury plans her day using author Jennifer Louden’s “Conditions of Enoughness,” deciding what she needs to get done to be satisfied at the end of the day. Then when she’s done, she’s done.
Trying to stick to a “normal” nine-to-five workday can present logistical problems for freelancers, too, as former freelancer Holly Case pointed out. “I remember one big article I was working on required me to interview an important expert. I spent nearly a week trying to reach him and never could. He finally called me at eleven p.m., explaining that he was on his way to a party in a limo and wondered if I could do the interview then. I said yes because I didn’t know if I would get it otherwise
Read the full piece.
Well, sort of.
But this time, I just couldn’t get the words of a friend out of my head: “Haven’t you ever used LinkedIn to get work?” he’d said. “I just bang out a few mails to connections and—boom!—something always comes up.”
I’ll be honest: I was baffled. Don’t get me wrong—when it comes to LinkedIn, I was a pretty early adopter and trundled past the all-important 500+ connections barrier a while ago. But for me, LinkedIn has only ever been an accessory, a place for potential clients to see I really exist and then, bowled over by the riotous trumpetings of my gold-plated CV, hire me for assignments. Could LinkedIn be more than just a fancy shop window for freelancers?
Short answer no with a but, long answer yes with an if. Read the full piece.
When I went freelance in the 1990s, very many people enthused at me about what it would like not being a boss. I knew they were wrong: it was more like I was taking on 17 bosses, each of them paying me a tiny bit.
All these years on, though, they were right. And I was wrong. (Would you look at that? A man saying he was wrong. Songs will be sung of this day.)
I have all these clients, all these editors, most people have just the one boss. But we are all working for ourselves and as easy as it can be to let the boss decide everything, as even easier as it is to just complain about that man or woman, you will be more productive and you will feel better when you realise that you are in charge.
Let’s not get silly about it. Punching your boss in the face is not empowerment, it’s unemployment and a possible legal case. But take everything your job requires you to do and look at it all is if you are the manager. Which bit does your client, your boss, really need? What bits are quick wins you can knock out in ten minutes? What’s the stuff that you know is just bollocks and busy work? And what is the stuff that you can do that needs help from other people? Best yet: what’s missing? What more can you do that will be really good for you, your boss, your company and your future pay rises?
Look at your job not as what you have to do or as who you are, but instead as this business that you are running. You have clients and customers, you have resources, if you use them like that instead of constantly reacting to whatever happens next or whoever demands things the loudest, you’ll feel in control. It’s the best feeling because it’s real, you’ll feel in control because you are.
Mind you, keep doing that and you could end up being promoted to boss. Or go freelance.