A Tale of FREELANCE-A-LOT
The Isolated Knight in King Arthur’s Court
If there’s one thing that changes your perspective about life...its death. Recently I’ve had three friends, within a month lose one of their parents. I’m at the doorway threshold to not only caring for aging relatives and neighbors but also seeing people my age and nearer dying.
I remember my mentor in college telling me how he hated the word “expire”. They told him his own father had expired when he was sixteen and it stuck with him ever since. In truth, I don’t mind the word. We do, like it or not, have an expiration date. We may not know what it is ahead of time but there is plenty of evidence to suggest if you do your best to take care of yourself, your chances of kicking that can down the road before you kick the bucket (to mix metaphors) is lengthened.
Freelance is probably a more offensive word to me. Nothing is free about it. In fact, the robbery is in the fact that all your free time is used up doing it because you can’t say ‘no’; a curse that affects the best of us.
Even as the days become shorter and the holidays with all their expectations are upon us like wolves baying at the moon, saying ‘no’ to more work and ‘yes’ to more sun and out-of-doors experience may help more than money can buy.
I try not to say ‘no’ outright. I usually say, I have a contract running over, or some other thing that suggests, that I’m in high demand, without outright lying. The point being is, there’s no reason to show your hand in terms of what you need personally. Not unless you have a solid relationship with the client. Always feel out what that client needs and when they need it. It could be something that could be pushed out a day or two. Knowing you have a few days before a good job starts, give yourself those days off. I mean completely off. Rolling from one client to the next can make your head spin.
Not catching a break or building breaks into your schedule can compound the interest and shorten not only your fuse, as you mind, body and soul crave some sort of reprieve. But it sets a hamster wheel precedent that only gets harder to break as family demands get harder on you.
A lot of business between Thanksgiving and New Years are in a sort of ‘stasis’ mode working at a much lower percentage.
If your client work is seasonally busy find out what season and schedule a vacation (whether you go anywhere or not) before or after that season. If it’s not, always tack on a few days to a week after a big job to catch your breath.
As a rule of thumb, I don’t work weekends.
But if I have to, I charge time and half. If I do that for more than two weeks things get ugly for me. Also, if I work for a solid week (not including weekends) I still give myself another few days between clients before I start another project. The longer I work for one client the more days off I add on the back end.
You’ve probably heard the adage: Work to live, don’t live to work.
It only took me until my 40s to get my head wrapped around it, but at least I’m not figuring it out before my career is over.
Still, having financial goals can drive one to lose their head and keep chasing after something that has yet to become tangible. Ask yourself if that can be delayed or pushed further out? Is there another way to go about getting what you want?
I recently asked my painting mentor this question:
WHERE DO YOU THINK DISCIPLINE COMES FROM?
He gave me an answer along the lines of, when you find an aptitude for something you realize if you want to progress you have to put in more time learning and doing that thing.
I said I agreed. I also added that I believed it came from our inherent sense of desire. We desired something, whether it’s the end result, fame or fortune, or what-have you. Desire can be an alluring trait.
Hunger can also be a dubious trait, but it is a little different than desire. Hunger feels like the result of a needful thing. As a young creative I was hungry for knowledge and experience. Sometimes that ravenous appetite caused me to make some very foolish choices in other areas of my life. I still make foolish choices. And I’m still hungry, but I believe I’ve had better practice at recognizing hunger over desire. The latter can have very selfish and very poor outcomes.
All this is to say, keeping yourself in check is about checking in on your needs and of those you love around you.
Giving of your time to yourself, family and friends is sometimes a better gift than anything money can buy. Be good to yourself.
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