So you want to give up your job and work for yourself?

Let’s talk about freelancing. Everywhere I look nowadays it seems there are blogs and articles encouraging you to give up your job and go “follow your dreams” by travelling the world and/or work from the comfort of their own home. The internet is filled with pictures of bored looking people staring at their desk looking uncomfortable juxtaposed against stories of happy looking girls with laptops out on the beach (bad idea; macbooks and sand are not friends) and it seems that we all would just love to quit the ‘drudgery’ of day to day life and go eat pasta and hang out with shamans in Bali. Thank you very much Elizabeth Gilbert.

For those of you who don’t know I’m a freelancer writer / digital marketer.  I straddle between journalism and marketing as a website editor, digital content manager and writer of articles, blogs, website copy etc.  Since I’ve gone freelance, people often tell me they would love to do what I do, expressing jealousy at the ability to work wherever and whenever I want. I get it. From the outside, being a freelancer who has spent the last two years travelling and living in the South of France and occasionally posting pictures like this does seem pretty appealing.

But I’ve got to be honest, the constant office-job bashing and the mentality that: working in office=bad, dull, pointless; while quitting and going travelling/working for yourself=living the dream, amazing, exciting is a very one dimensional view of a much more complicated situation.  So, I wanted to give you an honest reaction to some of the statements/questions I’ve had to some of the generalisations about freelancing.

You are your own boss! Oh wow I’d love that!

Would you? Really?  You are your own boss which means you’re probably the most lenient, and most critical boss you will ever have .  You become very hard on yourself because you know there is always more to give but you also know if you don’t get out of bed and don’t complete the tasks you’ve set, what are you gonna do? Fire yourself?

Being your own boss you become your worst enemy.

Plus it’s not just you. You have many bosses – your clients –  and while I currently have lovely clients, that hasn’t always been the case.

But freelancers make more money, right?

If you’ve ever worked at a reputable company that pays freelancers, you’ll know that their hourly or day rate is well above what a salaried employee would earn. Multiply that day rate by 5 days a week, 50 odd weeks a year and freelancing looks like a very promising prospect indeed.

But no freelancer will work that much and it’s not because they work two days a week and spend the rest chilling out watching reality TV. That day rate covers not only the day of working on that project but the possible mutliple days of pitching for that work, even longer marketing themselves, making their own websites, paying for their own training, going out networking and occasionally working on a project for a business that goes bust (it happens and contractors often get nothing).  None of that is paid and, from my experience, a lot more time is spent on all those extra parts than necessarily working on the projects that are paid for, even when you have a few solid, regular clients you have to take at least 30% of your time working on your business/yourself for nothing.

You’ll also notice I prefaced ‘company’ with ‘reputable.’  Not every company will pay freelancers the going rate, especially when it comes to writing or design or other competitive fields.  Plus the market, in the last few years, has changed immensely and there’s a lot more demand for, what I like to call, “pointless content” – articles that’ll help google find a website but offer no value to that reader whatsoever which devalues content, and the people that produce it, no end.

You can work in your PJs! I would never get dressed.

I promise you that’s a really bad idea. One of the things I learnt early on was the need to separate work and play time.  If it’s a physical space that you can go into, like an office, great. If not, then it has to be a process. Get up, go for a run or something active, have a shower, get into work mode then, when it’s time to switch off, switch off.

Sometimes, when travelling for example, that’s not as easy to do and when I do end up merging the two it can feel like I’m always working or never really getting enough work done.  Your mentality changes when you go into ‘work’ mode, or at least it does for me, so I always have to find ‘a space’ if I want to be in any way productive.

I would love to set my own hours; My brain doesn’t switch on before 12.

This is a true one and I actually think it’s a positive for most people.  I’m a morning person (not in a friendly way. I do best if I get up, get ready and start working, without talking to anyone. I become friendlier but less productive as the day goes on. Some people are night owls though and it really suits them not to work to set office hours.

There’s a danger though that if you’re not careful you can find yourself working all the time and if you work for clients in different time zones you have to be prepared to be working at odd hours.  If you have a tight deadline, you may end up working excessively long hours to satisfy a client that’s relying on you to get the job done.

If you are asked to do something by tomorrow even though it’s 6pm, quite often to keep this client, which may be a well-paying one, you will. Like I said, that day rate doesn’t come around on the days you necessarily want it to. This Christmas I was working on a bunkbed in a hostel at 4am finishing up a project.

You can go on holiday whenever you want for as long as you want!

Oh yeah definitely and for me this ability to go where I want, when I want is one of the most amazing benefits of working for myself, however paid holidays are a luxury of working for a salary.

Taking a true holiday in the freelance world means switching off altogether and choosing to go without pay for a week/weeks at a time.  This year I’ve taken one holiday and that was for the week of wedding. But I have travelled a lot while still working.  Over December, in between visiting Christmas markets and drinking gluwhein I was taking time outs to find somewhere to connect my laptop to the wifi and work.  At one point I was working at 4am on a bunkbed in Berlin to get a project finished.  I could have said no of course but if I had I may not have continued to work for them now so it was worth it to sacrfice a bit of extra sleep to get the work done and not miss out on anything in my travels either.

I would get so much more done – like chores and housework – if I didn’t have to work all day.

Cue: unimpressed face.

When I’m working from home I am still working, even when I don’t have a project on. But I see where you got that idea from (even if I now like you a little bit less than before).  When you are physically out of the house and in an office there is no way you can just pick up that hoover, or put the washing on, or start making dinner. When you’re at home, you can.

But while I love being able to use my breaks productively to throw on some washing or hoover or pick up some shopping these things all take time and some days, when you’ve got a lot on, you can’t just take a quick break to do things at home even though you feel like you should because you’re there. This can be distracting and, if you don’t live with someone understanding, could cause problems.

It’s so good you don’t have to go into the office

Sure, it’s nice not dealing with office politics, rush hour armpit sniffing and that person who chews too loudly. But you also don’t have the satisfaction that comes from working on a project with a team and then going out for a drink to celebrate or the comfort of knowing that every day you are going to have work and every month you are going to get paid.

This last month I’ve had the opportunity to go back to my old job on a contract and I’ll be honest, I’ve kind of loved it. The team, the work, the routine, the separation of work and home. It  did briefly make me wonder whether I really was suited better to this kind of working more than the instability of freelancing. I figured what I probably needed was to bring a lot more routine to my freelance schedule.

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