The Psychological Trap of Freelancing

Post by balabaster » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

akulbe wrote: post #250

balabaster wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty much a jack of all trades. My professional expertise and where I've spent the majority of my career is in software engineering, systems architecture, devops and test automation. In what little spare time I have I'm co-founder and instructor for an educational organic farm which means I'm often playing carpenter, mechanic and vet as well as being a full time Dad.

Would love to talk with you more. Do you blog somewhere? I have an email in my profile.

Post by hnick » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 11:33 PM UTC

mgbmtl wrote: post #225

mundacho wrote: post #84

My biggest mistake at the beginning of freelancing was that I sold more or less 8 hours a day of work. That's too much because as a freelancer you do not have vacations or paid sick days, and contract. So I corrected it to 120 hours a month, that means that: * I can recover sick days if needed. * I can work a little bit extra for 1 or two months to get a 1 week vacation. * I can use the extra hours a day to do some m…

That still seems rather high to me. I usually aim at having 3-4 billable hours per day. The rest of the time, if I'm not slacking off, I put into improving the product or sales. Even for salaried workers, I don't think anyone would expect them to do actual productive work for more than 3-4h of programming per day (rest of the time being spent on meetings, planning, office distractions, etc).