The Freelancer's Dilemma

In the ten or so years I’ve been working, I’ve had a variety of jobs. I’ve worked for very good, fair people. I’ve worked for people who are demanding and infuriating to deal with. I’ve worked for people whose principles I could agree with and those I really could not. But, over the past eight months or so, as I went through a period of working on a freelance basis for the longest, consistent stretch of time in my life, I realised that the very worst person I’ve worked for is myself.

Let me clarify: I love working for myself, on a freelance basis. There are an array of benefits to working as a freelancer that suit not only my way of working but also my introversion. I love the ability to set my own schedule. Gone are the days where I had to wake up at the crack of dawn, the sun barely touching the horizon, to commute an hour to an office, with as much office politics to deal with as there was actual work to be done. I love being able to balance out what I’m working on, to bring variety into my day with different projects on the go. And I really love, as I am doing at this very moment, that I can do my first couple of hours of work for the day from the warm cocoon of my bed.

The problem is not so much working for myself, as it is that the myself I’m working for is a real arsehole. But only to myself. The consideration and the fair manner with which I’ve always tried to treat any staff under me in workplaces seems to disappear when the only employee I’m dealing with is myself. Rather than encouragement, I give myself only criticism. Rather than satisfaction, I give myself guilt. Rather than setting realistic goals and expectations, I except everything and treat any achievement as nothing.

Going into the new year, I was very aware that I needed to adjust my schedule in so much as making sure that I wasn’t just working all day, every day – for want of something to do during an ongoing lockdown, as much as anything. What I forgot to take into account was the voice of guilt that would accompany the moment when I closed down my emails for the evening.

It didn’t seem to matter if it was late into the night and I’d been working for nine, maybe ten, hours by that point. The voice would return, asking why I thought I could consider myself done for the day. It asked after the items on my to-do list not crossed out, it probed for just another hour of my time. 

Best part of working late: wine. (I am dreaming of the day when I can sit and write in a little bar somewhere again).

My lack of boundaries with clients only compounded the problem. If someone emailed me late at night on a Friday, I would make it to Saturday afternoon, at best, before I’d have to reply, for fear that they would think I was lazy or slacking by not getting back to them sooner. Even though it was the weekend; even though, as a freelancer, I’m entitled to time off just like everyone else. I would backtrack through my week, point out the long lunch break I took one day to call my niece, or the walk I went on mid-afternoon. As though every hour had to be calculated back in at another time.

Financially, the extra hours didn’t even equate to much, if anything. Along with a lack of boundaries comes a real difficulty, in most cases, in charging the rate I really should be. The weight of working such long days to find that my bank balance hadn’t changed in spite of it added another level of stress to an already clouded mind.

At some point, it was easy to blame the lockdown for my workaholic tendencies. It seemed a natural thought process that the reason I was working so much was simply down to the fact that I had nothing much else to do in the quiet of my apartment. There are only so many episodes of television I can watch without getting antsy. There is only so many monasteries I can raid as a viking in a video game. There is only so many times I can reorganise my bookshelf.

Reflecting on it, however, I could quickly recognise that this wasn’t new behaviour. I have always been a workaholic. The very behaviour I used to criticise in my father has become a part of who I am. When I was working office jobs, I would likely have at least one or two freelance projects on the side which I would shove into the late evening hours or into the weekend. At the office jobs themselves, I would frequently do more than my role required and then complain bitterly about how I wasn’t getting paid for it – even though, frequently (although not always) I hadn’t actually been asked to do it, I’d just taken it upon myself to fix a problem at hand. 

I’m still workaholic – now I’m just a workaholic with nothing else to do and no one to tell me to stop. Friends do try, although I’m nothing if not stubborn. A friend asked me after a stressful week what I planned to do that weekend for myself. I dithered. I had some work to finish. He asked again. I formulated some kind of answer.

The beauty of being a freelancer is the working week does not need to be the traditional forty hours, nine-to-five structure. Nor does the working week need to be so much as forty hours. There are a lot of movements for scrapping forty hours in the traditional work setting already, and many studies have proven that, of that time, a small percentage is actually productive. Cutting out the unnecessary office politics and the distractions of sitting at a computer all day in a busy office, you often find you can get all your day’s work done in the space of a few hours. 

A 2016 study suggested that the average freelancer worked thirty-six hours a week which is not far off the traditional working week. But going into the survey results, most people acknowledge that that time is not split evenly – that their working day can be anywhere between half an hour to fourteen hours.

I work enough. I probably work a bit more than enough. I pointedly have not sat down to calculate what my average working week looks like. The challenge for me is in learning to be a little more forgiving of my sole employee; to treat her a bit more like I would treat any member of a team I might have in a different work setting. 

I want to go to bed without the guilt of the outstanding tasks on my to-do list. I want to be able to tell clients that they will have to wait until next week. I want to be able to charge a proper rate and not feel like I’m taking advantage of someone even though I know the work I’m providing is of value. Realistically, I don’t think I’d go back into an office setting in any kind of long-term, full-time way. It was never something I enjoyed pre-pandemic and it’s not something I wish for. I have some work coming up on a part-time basis in an in-person environment and the mix of that with working from home, on a freelance basis, I hope will bring a bit more balance to my life. 

I want to change my mindset. I want to recognise the work I’m doing, rather than thinking that the hours are lost with nothing to show for it. It’s just after ten o’clock. I may still be in my pyjamas but I’ve already written around 4,000 words across multiple projects. Hopefully the boss will be appeased – I, at least, am pretty happy with that.