Posts tagged freelance
“ Never, ever sacrifice your happiness for a paycheck. It’s better to scrounge for change in the couch than to do something that is sucking out your soul.”
Freelancing, by the Numbers: 2011
I can unequivocally say that 2011 was the most formidable and fulfilling year of my adult life. It was my first full year of just freelancing, which means it was the first year that I have been wholly in charge of my financial situation. It was also the first year I have kept a detailed budget since I had my first job at 16. It was the year I paid off my credit cards in full. It was the year I didn’t leave Central Europe all summer, and still had a blast. It was the year I stepped foot on the African continent for the first time (and did it cheap as hell). Most importantly, it was the year I broke even, despite working the least and having the most fun of my adult life.
But forget my words, let’s look at the numbers, because graphs are fun!
Here’s a breakdown of my total expenses for 2011, by category:
Fun fact: I spent 1/3 of my food budget on booze. Yay? The basics such as rent, electricity, and food ate up the biggest chunk of my budget, but paying off those credit cards (i.e. the sins of the past) really took a toll. 2012 goal: keep that number under 5%. Oh, and then there’s that pesky student loan…
Now that we’ve got money out, here’s money in:
As you can see, proofreading and translations paid the bills. Considering my savings took a hit, it’s no surprise I barely earned any interest. Other is generally selling stuff, band money (very rare), photography gigs (even more rare) or gifts from family, while writing only earned me a measly 6% of my income. My goal for 2012: 50% income from writing.
Perhaps the hardest part of freelancing was the month-to-month disparities in income. Feast or famine, as they say:
(Net income + savings - net expenses)
All in all, I scraped by. I earned exactly PLN 188.39 (about $50) more than I spent in 2011, and managed to end up with just under PLN 800 (about $230) more in my savings account than I started 2011 with.
The Important Part
Victory? Technically, yes. Really though, this was just a(n educational) start to the freelance lifestyle, and this year I need to earn a whole lot more, spend a bit less (especially on booze, ouch) to make this thing sustainable. There is some hope, though, because here’s another telling figure:
Pages translated or proofread in 2011: 1085.18
Estimated hours worked* in 2011: 813.89
Hours worked in a normal 9-5, 40hrs/wk job (assuming 50 weeks): 2,000
What this means: while the average joe was slaving away in a lightless office for 2,000 hours of 2011, I spent about half of that actually working, while the rest was spent reading, working on my websites, reading more, playing music, biking, enjoying the summer, going to festivals, traveling, and in general feeling better about life. That also means I can still work a bit more this year, earn a better income, while still having more free time than if I were traditionally employed.
Just to bring it all home, this was me working in November, on a sunny beach in Barcelona, sipping cappuccinos and enjoying the 19 degree t-shirt temperatures:
What this untimely means: the “free” in “freelancing” makes it absolutely worth it.
*This was my best guess, judging that it takes an average of 15-30 minutes for me to proofread one page and 40-60 minutes to translate one page, based on the breakdown of translation and proofreading pages… let’s just say there was some complicated math involved, but my best guess is that I spent between 800-1,100 hours working in 2011, whereas the average person would have spent 2,000.
“ As the hierarchy of the traditional workplace breaks down, we are all gaining more freedom and flexibility. More and more, we can set our own long-term goals, we can determine our own work schedules, we can work at an office or at a coffee shop, we can make our own decisions about what we focus on today, and what we focus on tomorrow. But this “freedom” also brings responsibility — a responsibility that, I would argue, demands a vastly increased capacity for self-control.”
If I had to pinpoint the single most difficult part of freelancing, this is it. Not the occasional poverty, not the lack of regiment (which I enjoy), not the instability (also a plus in my book), but the sheer amount of self-control it takes to get anything done, and more importantly, to build a business and a future rather than just getting by.
In essence, I began freelancing nearly a year ago as the kid who grabbed the marshmallow after two minutes. I may have left my old job, but I was still weighed down by my old habits, and it took months for me to even realize this, and the past two or three months of continuous, hard work to get a grip on it, which I still consider very much a work in progress. But I’ve gotten better. Even if I don’t always control my Facebook itch, I’m aware of it. Even if I don’t always wait until I’ve finished all of my work for the day to eat dinner (a surprisingly effective habit I’ve found), I know that’s what I need to do, and I do it more often from week to week. If nothing else, jumping off the deep end into the freelance pool has made me minutely aware of all of my faults, and singularly motivated to improve on each and every one. That’s why I’ve started getting in shape again. That’s why I’ve been setting goals and writing them down on a giant white board hanging over my desk in my apartment. That’s why I’ve made a lot of them public, to keep myself accountable. That’s why I want to stop drinking for a month or two, or at least severely cut down. That’s why I keep some semblance of a schedule, even though I don’t have to. That’s why I need to make myself write more, whether I feel like it or not, whether I have paid work to do or not, because everything depends entirely on me now, which is an equally terrifying and exciting prospect.
On the Resurgence of Wanderlust
One thing I hadn’t really noticed since I’ve been freelance is my usually ever-present wanderlust. When I was working regularly, I would constantly dream of travel. Some of my most epic trips took place in the last few years - the Trans-siberian/China/Australia trip, Iceland on my birthday, several Scandinavian adventures. This summer I stayed relatively close to home. I only left Poland for a few days, and only to neighboring countries - the Czech Republic, Germany, and Ukraine (though that last one was a first and quite an adventure).
Part of it is because I’ve been watching the excellent Long Way Round and Long Way Down series on the recommendation of a friend. Part of it is that my 29th birthday is approaching, adding some urgency to my goal of stepping on all of the continents except Antarctica by the time I’m 30. Either way, I have two very massive undertakings in the next year - Africa and South America - and I really need to get started on the planning stages.
So this is partly my asking for advice, particularly when it comes to Africa. That’s probably the first trip I’ll take, and the one that requires the most planning and security considerations. Oh, and I have to do all of this dirt cheap, on account of my constant near-poverty, which is probably another reason why I haven’t travelled much since going freelance - though hopefully with another writing gig or two that will change. It would be great to spend time working in Africa to at least pay for the travel there, so that’s something I’ll definitely look into. Oh, and going by boat would be awesome. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all the thought I’ve put into this so far.
Help?
“ There are about 25 million Americans who develop grotesque facial ticks when they hear the words ‘9 to 5.’ … We call them freelancers.”
N. Killiham, The Washington Post, May 23, 1989
I don’t know how I never came across this quote before, but I absolutely love it. I also wonder if that figure is much higher these days due to the economy…
On Turning Off
I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, and no matter how I try to rationalize it (I’ve had a lot of work, my parents visited, there was an epic wedding weekend, I had to clean up cat puke) and say I’ve been too busy living to write, I find that excuse leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Imagine me dropping dead and my obit reading, “She was doing so well but then she got too busy to breathe. Poor thing.”
So what’s the problem, exactly? It’s been eight months since I left my old job and turned freelance. I’m slowly getting to the position where I’m getting steady work (though I need to do more marketing and sort out some legal details still). My website is set up, so all that’s left is to do the actual work when I have it, and that takes far fewer hours per week than my old job required of me, especially since I no longer have to spend eight hours in an office whether I have work to do or not. I have more time than I’ve had since my first year of college (the only time I didn’t also have a job), and plenty of ideas for writing projects, not just in this blog. And yet, it seems that every part of my day is increasingly occupied. So what’s the matter with me?
I think I’ve isolated at least part of it: I may have left my old job behind in December, but I took my old habits with me.
When I had to sit in an office all day, I developed coping mechanisms. As I’m a late riser and night worker, I’d spend the first hour or two of each morning just trying to force my brain awake so I could start being productive. This involved visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, downing enough coffee to dispatch a small elephant and generally killing time until I either had to do something time-sensitive or felt like my brain was present enough to start writing an actual article.
When I used to check email at work, it was a matter of keeping my head above water during the daily flood, which meant ignoring a good number of messages, putting many off until the absolute last minute, and dealing with the truly urgent ones - but not immediately, just before it was too late.
These days, I set my own hours. If I feel like working early (say, noonish), I work early. If I feel like getting groceries and working out and making a nice dinner during the day and then working until the wee hours, I do that. I don’t have a set schedule, I have a schedule regulated by necessity and efficiency. I work when I feel I’m most productive. As for email, it’s no longer a flood but a manageable trickle.
And yet, I still won’t answer some messages for days, though they require minimum effort on my part. Worse still, I find myself spending significant parts of my day visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, drinking coffee and energy drinks and generally killing time. Except now it’s my time that I’m wasting, not an employer’s, and I’m the only one losing out.
This week was a bit of an eye-opener, in that all of my precious habits that I had developed during my years of working at the newspaper and continued into my freelance life were forcefully disrupted. My parents visited for the week, and since my apartment is tiny that meant I slept at a friend’s place while they took over my flat. That meant no computers, TV or even wifi before bed or right in the morning. Over the weekend two of my good friends got married, and since it was a proper Polish wedding that meant the festivities started on Thursday and finished Monday morning. Luckily, I didn’t have much work during that time, and none of it was that urgent, so that means I spent less time in front of my computer and more time surrounded by breathing human beings that weekend than I had in years - and I had an amazing time. Sure, it helped that the wedding party was well stocked with enough food and booze to keep a small nation-state going for weeks, and that I was surrounded by old friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, as well as my parents, who I see about once a year, but in the end what matters is that the world kept going even if I wasn’t constantly reading about it, and I didn’t die of boredom even if I didn’t constantly have a screen in front of my face.
Does that mean I’m going to throw out my computers and start crashing Polish weddings? No, I like working just enough to ward off imminent starvation (though, have you ever seen a Polish wedding? Crashing those would keep me fed for life…). But it does mean that I need to reevaluate how I spend my time, so that every minute spent in front of a screen is spent doing something that will either earn me money now or in the future. I need to start creating more and consuming less. I need to unsubscribe from RSS feeds (or just delete Reeder off my Mac and phone), be content with listening to the BBC while making breakfast for my daily news fix, turn off the screens before bed and get enough sleep so I can drink coffee for pleasure, not necessity, and take back my time.
In other words, I need to unsubscribe from my old habits, and embrace new ones. It’s about time.
On That Moment
12:21 am last night. That’s when it came, that moment. It comes more or less weekly, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always when you’re alone. No television, no spouse, no distractions in your headphones. The bed is the best place - that, or the shower. But it’s always when you have just let your guard down, whether scrubbing routinely or just about to drift away.
That moment, when just for a split second, you know you’re not going to make it.
It takes different forms for different people, most more mundane. A housewife knows they’ll run out of money. A father sees his children taken away. A soldier sees the bullet that will sail straight for him. And I see failure and mediocrity, of being not a late bloomer like I always thought, but a non-bloomer.
Just for that moment, you know, know it’s not worth it, that every effort you make is a waste. But then it’s over, and reason takes over, and you see the road ahead with your dreams fulfilled, or at least a damn good effort made towards them. And luckily, this feeling lasts longer.
UK Interpreters Boycotting Applied Language Solutions Agency: pisspoor rates, mishandling of personal data, and unqualified interpreters | No Peanuts! for Translators
I’m so behind this. Not only do people willing to work for peanuts (in any profession) show a deep lack of self-respect, they ruin the market for the rest of us. I understand being competitive, but when you’re settling for half the going rate just to get that little bit of extra business, it’s no longer even profitable for you.
In places like Poland, where the “entrepreneurial spirit”, if you will, is not so deep-seated as in other Western countries, my theory is that this willingness to undervalue yourself comes from a fear of failure. Generally, if you’re a freelancer (working contract to contract) or you start your own firm, you’re going to earn 20-30% more than someone working at an agency doing the same work (at least in the translation business). But, you’re going to have to hunt down your own clients, run your own website, and if the going gets tough, make your own “Will translate 4 food” signs. At an agency, you’ll earn less (dramatically less in some cases, as the linked article testifies to), but at least you have that warm fuzzy feeling that you probably won’t starve to death.
And some people like that (yeah, I don’t understand it either).
What we need in this country, though, is a sense that a healthy amount of risk is not only good, but necessary to succeed as an individual and as a society. And that means that instead of doing work for laughable rates, you tell your employer to shove it and become my competition. Because hey, chances are, I’m earning a lot more than you (without even trying, ha!). So come and take it, if you can.
On Freelancing, By the Numbers*
Beverages consumed:
Coffee: 2
Latte: 1
Frappuccino: 1
Green tea: 1
Club-Mate: 1
Guinness: 1
Tyskie (Polish beer): 1
Ciechan (one of my favorite Polish beers): 1
Vodka shot: 1
Pages translated: 17
Pages left to be translated: 4
Money spent: 43.50 złoty
Money earned if this job is finished: enough to pay next month’s rent and then some
Times Facebook checked: 7
Times Tumblr checked: 2
Unrelated articles read: 5
Tracks played in iTunes: 38
Best track heard at a cafe: “So Says I” by The Shins**
Podcasts listened to in transit: 1
Apartments worked in: 1
Cafes worked in: 3
Cafes kicked out of due to closing: 2
Cafes kicked out of for other reasons***: 0
Times refused alcohol at a cafe: 1
Djarum Blacks smoked: 4
Average Internet speed: 139 Mb/s
Torrents downloaded while working: 2
Sci-fi TV show pilots thought of and then quickly abandoned: 1
Blog posts thought of: 3
Blog posts actually written: 1
*Or, how I did a week’s worth of work in one night
**For the nostalgia factor
***Including, but not limited to, zombie attack
