Increase your hourly rate until the demand for hours decreases to the level you prefer.
Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
11–20 of 126 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#12The most important person is you, and you need to take care of yourself, first.
If you’re close to 100% and not burned out, when working, you’ll thrive.
I only learned this 12 years in. I’m on year 16 now.
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#13How do I 'justify' taking unpaid vacation?
For me the question is entirely reversed. I have to justify to myself giving up my time for a client or employer. The natural state is for me to fart around, I wasn't put on this planet to commute to a cube.
I do it because it allows me to achieve my goals - things like having fun experiences, donating to charity, helping out family and friends, being a useful human.
If I did it 24/7 then those goals would fade into irrelevance because I'd have no time to pursue any of them.
I had wrote a longer post, but I've edited it, because I think really this is the key take-away. Do you work to live, or live to work?
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#14There are alternative employment opportunities out there. You shouldn’t have negotiate for time with your family - this is a form of bullying by your employer.
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
200-300 tasks is a lot. Do you work only for one company or for a bunch of companies. Can you drop one of the companies and keep all the others?
one company, multiple projects (but basically two main ones and under them subprojects), each has many tasks (some of them smaller doable in minutes, some of them bigger taking hours) I could drop one project I really don't like, because how unprofessional they are, so I started to get quite bitchy about it and also refused recently task and voiced my objections about their workflow/mismanagement. I would not mind at…
If you are accepting / rejecting work in 20 min units of work, you might want to rethink things a bit. The micromanagement level at play here would make any work/life balance out of whack.
Maybe the question to ask is — can I start bidding on work in units of 1-2 week increments? You’d still have multiple smaller tasks in that block. But that would start to give you more flexibility in how to organize you days.
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#16There are alternative employment opportunities out there. You shouldn’t have negotiate for time with your family - this is a form of bullying by your employer.
The OP is self employed.
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#17Increase your hourly rate until the demand for hours decreases to the level you prefer.
That works if the OP has many different customers. But the easiest way to raise prices is with new customers.
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#18There are alternative employment opportunities out there. You shouldn’t have negotiate for time with your family - this is a form of bullying by your employer.
The OP is self employed.
Not sure if it was intentional but GP reframes the situation -- one would not tolerate that behavior from employer, why tolerate it from one's self?
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#19This sounds like you only have one customer. That's your problem. If you had six or seven customers, you would have leverage to negotiate with them.
As the situation stands, you would be happy with less money for less time -- that means that you might be in a position to hire an employee to do some of the work for you.
Re: Ask HN: How do you justify taking unpaid vacation as self employed?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if I start rejecting projects they will find someone else ... Which you're basing on: > it doesn't work that easily that I can just limit how much work I take without repercussions (it already happened in past, but not because of rejecting reason) If it's true that they won't accept anything less than 12 hour days with zero down time, then you're better off working elsewhere.
it's not 12 hours day, on bad day (usually monday and friday) is 8-10 hours of actual work, on good days (which are very rare recently) 3-4 hours, but usually I work between 5-7 hours (with some gaps between) plus I have free weekends most of the time and maybe 10 days of Chinese holidays spread over year If I worked as full time employee here in Europe, I would spend 9-10 hours in work each day including commuting b…
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