31–40 of 126 posts
Work/life balance is important. We can only go so long before our quality of work begins to suffer, along with our mental health.
Seek out more clients, raise your rates, and sub-contract the more menial/unpleasant parts of what you do, would be the ways I would look at addressing this.
When I contracted, I set my rates and anticipated annual hours to include (1) holidays (2) vacations (3) a bit of sick time (4) un-paid work (like finding new clients). I could always make more by working more, but I didn't want to.
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It's really no different that a salaried job. I could take "vacation" from a salary job to work on a side-gig, but I don't because that would be exhausting.
Budget for money, budget for time off, take the time off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That works if the OP has many different customers. But the easiest way to raise prices is with new customers.
If OP has only one customer they do not work for themselves, they work for that customer and have a job - regardless of what they like to tell themselves.
Useful heuristic: if you can't afford the risk of a vacation and the time to find another gig, you are self enslaved, and not self employed.
Normally the typical advice when someone who is self employed has too much work is for them to raise their rates, but this works much better if you have more than one client since that does mean that you still have some clients to fall back on otherwise...
For your specific situation, I'm not sure what to say, apart from advising you to try to get out of this situation by 1) finding other better paying clients and 2) slowly reducing the tasks you do for your current client to the more value added tasks.
When you bill by the hour, it's natural to start thinking of everything in terms of lost time and money. And I actually think it's reasonable to think about the cost of taking time off, but if this is keeping you from taking vacation and spending time with your family, then you are severely undervaluing your time off. You can think of time off as a sort of cost, but it's a very small cost compared to the value it provides.
I don't have experience with working for customers in different cultures and across international borders, so I'm afraid I don't have any insight there. If I was in that situation, I think it would still come down to negotiating the vacation that I need.
I also don't have much experience with juggling several (>2) projects at once. In my experience, people seldom need just a little software engineering. If someone wants some software engineering, they usually want a LOT of it and don't want to compete for your time with other projects. So I tend to work on one project at a time, take vacations, and when the gig comes to an end, I look forward to taking a few months off to study.
So I suppose if I was in your shoes, I would insist on vacation, and not worry too much if I lost a customer that wanted to burn me out. (I acknowledge that working in the software industry puts me in a rather privileged position where I can be picky.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If OP has only one customer they do not work for themselves, they work for that customer and have a job - regardless of what they like to tell themselves.
I'm not sure this logic follows. I generally take on one client at a time, sometimes for many months (even years, on occasion). I've ended gigs that I was unhappy with, and I've stayed on contracts for extended periods of time. I still make my own hours and have relative freedom to operate how I please, despite only having one client at a time.
Your resume says you own and operate a consulting business.
Earlier 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…
If all you need is a laptop and internet then there's nothing stopping you from an entire month at a vacation destination.