Freelance! Glorious Freelance!

Time to read: 2 minutes

Sam Howard looks at how to survive and thrive on the freelance diet…

Most freelancers say they took this path to improve their quality of life. Most ex-freelancers say they gave it up because the feast-and-famine aspect was completely counterintuitive to achieving the work-life balance they craved.

Ergo, to sustain independence, you need a strategy for coping with the Cabbage Soup Diet one week and the All You Can Eat Buffet for the next. Here’s mine:

Feast: I love the pace, the focus, and the fear of The Feast!

But this year, instead of doing my impression of an overworked Scrat and chasing down every last acorn, I pulled in fellow freelance experts to do the bits they do best. That leaves me to what I do best. Net result – delighted clients (several experts for the price of one) and several happy experts instead of one. That’s karmically a good thing, right? In the short term, slightly fewer acorns for me. However, by delivering excellent work (i.e. better than I could manage on my own), hopefully we planted a few metaphorical oak trees for the long term.

Famine: So I could stare at the ceiling and wonder if going freelance has completely ruined my career

Or, instead, I could actually look forward to the downtime and line up a load of projects designed to get out of the office, rest the brain and exercise the brawn. You might have heard the whoop of joy as I slammed down the lid of my laptop on 15th May, 10.45 am.

Over the coming weeks, I finally redecorated the bedroom after nine years of dreaming in bloody magnolia. The net result—I swapped eight hours a day for twelve but achieved an almost zen-like mental status. When the ‘real’ work kicked back in, both client-side and housekeeping, I returned to it quite refreshed and with rather shapely upper arms.

Regular meals: I struggle when, to my mind, there is not enough ‘real’ work to lace the day with the Fear – so I don’t do it at all

Instead, I sanded down the kitchen worktops. After several days of this, yes, the worktops are very shiny, but the real work has insidiously mounted up. The Fear has a genuine reason to be there, and I’m in a self-induced state of work bulimia.

Grazing seems beyond me.

But at least if ever I feel tempted to lay in bed, stare at the ceiling, and ponder the vagaries of freelance work, I can also admire the paintwork.