The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
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The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
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Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#2I am a freelancer, and I chose this path specifically so I could work less, not more.
For me, money is just the road to my personal and family enjoyment. If I can’t enjoy life while making money, what’s even the point of making it? The road to happiness seems obvious to me: charge more (and automate income), work less, have more free time.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#3My approach so far is to:
(a) charge a high rate
(b) preferably charge for projects or
(c) definitely only charge at full day granularity
(d) leave some slack in the accounting, favouring the client
The thing is that the client is not really paying you for your time, they are paying you for the value you can deliver. Time is a very rough analog, but so far seems the best that we can do and actually agree to.
So the above leaves the time-based accounting in place, but de-emphasises it as much as possible.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#4The problem described by the OP largely goes away when you stop charging by the hour.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#5Freelancer here. This does not ring true for me. I can see a causation between freelancing and vacation. Vacations "seem" more expensive as they are both a cost and a period of lost income.
But all those existential worries looks like an underlying issue with the person itself, more than freelancing in general. Freelancing may enhance it. But if you are more angry, less social and hence less happy, then no matter what job you are in - you should probably consider a change.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#6The problem described by the OP largely goes away when you stop charging by the hour.
Exactly. All you need to do is charge on 'per project basis'. But it's fare to say that not all freelancer can do this. There isn't really such thing as a 'freelancer'. A coder, a writer, a designer, a virtual assistant - these are entirely different lines of work.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#7Five hours of working on something you like, often feels like ten minutes working on something you don't.
The real benefit of freelancing is that you will tend to pick work that you actually want to do; which also means that you may indeed end up working more.
But then again, giving people more choice is not good for everybody. Some people will simply turn their lives into a freak show.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#8Attaching a dollar value to time is productive.
I do see the point though. I’m on a very inefficient board of a financially struggling non-profit. And I keep doing the math of “If we could meet for 1 hour instead of 3, the money saved by the board would pay for the deficit.” I squirm every time we spend thousands of dollars of time on fifty or a hundred dollar items. So the OP does have a point that’s there’s a downside in terms of frustration.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#9I am a freelancer, and I chose this path specifically so I could work less, not more. For me, money is just the road to my personal and family enjoyment. If I can’t enjoy life while making money, what’s even the point of making it? The road to happiness seems obvious to me: charge more (and automate income), work less, have more free time.
I can really echo this way of thinking. I chose this role because I knew it was flexible (sometimes by choice, sometimes by chance), which means the downtime is built-into the price.
I frequently (happily) take days off to be with my daughter, and can very much enjoy the downtime when a client needs to have me out for 4-5 hours instead of a full 8-10.
The only time this thinking creeps in is when scheduling longer vacations. It's somehow easy to spread the cost of downtime over a day or week, but much more difficult to spread a chunk of vacation 'downtime' over the rest of the year. I'm actually toying with the idea of paying myself quarterly to see if I can curb this sensation.
Re: The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
#10The problem described by the OP largely goes away when you stop charging by the hour.
SO much this. Having gone from salaried employee to freelance consultant, and now to running a product-based business, I've come to the conclusion that being paid per hour is anathema to the quality of my working life.