Today is my last day of being a freelancer/unemployed bum/general lay-about. For the past two years (roughly) I've worked from home as a magazine editor and writer.
A few things I've learned:
Freelancing at home does not mean 'hanging out at the beach half the day then banging out 200 words in the afternoon'. It's work. You need to set yourself somewhat regular and strict hours, which you need to comply with. Yes, there is more freedom. But there is also more weekend work, evening work, and also, there is more pressure on YOU to be organised and professional without anyone prompting you. This can be hard. It is hard. I basically ensure I sit down at the computer every day by 8:30 at the latest and I try to stay there until 5pm, otherwise I just faff around and don't get anything done.
Income can be irregular and even when you're working, a lot, there's no gaurantee you'll be paid promptly. Or at all. I had some jobs I didn't get paid for last year for various reasons, and other jobs where it took up to three months for my employers to cough up the money. This can lead to a famine and feast cycle which is hard to break out of, even with budgeting and planning. I maxed out my credit card about eight times last year. Thankfully I have a partner with a good income to smooth out the rough bits, but if you're doing this as your main form of family income or as a single person, it can be really really hard coping with the varied cashflow.
Being your own IT person, HR manager, accounts person and boss can also be very tough. I'm not very good at financial and technical things but I've become a lot better at managing my bills, tax information, receipts, super, and so on, as well as trouble-shooting my computer equipment and so on.
If you are in a couple, the person who works from home can end up doing more housework. A load of washing here, a quick sweep of the kitchen floor there, washing up after breakfast, walking the dog, and so on. This can be a tough thing to negotiate, my advice is to sort out a way of it not becoming a big issue. Either don't do the extra housework or try to figure out a way of making it equitable. In my own relationship, I justified it on a financial level. I decided that my additional housework was compensating my partner for the additional money he paid into certain things, like our car and our health insurance. It might not be an exact trade, but you know, justifications are nine-tenths of, well, everything.
Anyway, I could have kept going with freelancing and working on it as a career, but I found it too hard. Living in a relatively new city and working from home, while my partner travelled a lot, has been really isolating and difficult. My natural tendencies for procrastination and my shyness have been my own worst enemies. While I do appreciate the freedoms that come with being your own boss, I have also spent a lot of the last two years feeling utterly alone and miserable; and either pressed upon by too much work, or unwanted with not enough. I never really wanted to freelance either, I just fell into it as a way of paying the rent while I looked for work.
And how can we forget working at the cafe to make ends meet when the freelancing lagged? That was a pretty low period of my life. Cafe work is not, in and of itself, a demeaning or awful thing. But I felt like I had been revealed as a person who was only capable of the most basic sort of work, and it was a blow to my idea of myself as someone capable of conceptual thought and writing. After eight hours on my feet dealing with rude customers and their awful messes, not to mention the loo-cleaning and being bossed around by teenagers, I really felt like a complete waste of space as a human being. If you are in the service industry, I don't mean to diminish the work you do -- this is as much about my own ridiculous ideas of what it means to be 'successful' as anything else.
Anyway, I don't expect my new job to make my life all sunshine and flowers and so on. However, having a regular income, and a place of work outside the home, as well as colleagues and a defined structure to my life, is something I recognise I need -- at least for the next few years. It's easy to romanticise that-which-you-do-not-have, and I know the new job is going to be a challenge. I will miss those days when I knocked off at 3pm and took the dog to the beach, or being able to duck out and grab some yarn and do some knitting in the back yard when I needed a bit of a break.
But it's a good thing. (God I hope it's a good thing and I hope there are no psycho bosses, evil workmates, crazy hours or electric-shock delivering computers. Or yachts. Please don't let there be any yachts.)
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