Freelancing Dilemmas

I recently went to a presentation at SVA about starting your own business, and the speaker Katherine Crowley said something that really hit me. She pointed out that a freelancer will always be their own their toughest boss. It made all of us in the audience laugh because we knew it was true. We are always denying ourselves of vacations, never breaking for lunch until our work is perfected or finished and of course nothing is ever good enough.

She mentioned how ironic "freelancing" was because ideally we do it because we want to have more freedom. But instead we end up working more than we should, like from 9am-10pm, or we'll work on holidays, and so on. Plus when you work from home (like I do 40% of the time) that means you'll be at work even while you're in the shower, when you're cooking, right up until you to go bed. The key is to set boundaries, but I always find this extremely hard to do since 85% of my at home time is spent doing work and about 70% of my outside time is also spent doing work.

Katherine, who's been in business for over 15 yrs, also mentioned that people who work for themselves end up with more chronic illnesses than people that work for someone else. I can attest to that, since my back and wrist are the worst they've ever been and the quality of my eyesight has been steadily decreasing.

If you want to check out Katherine Crowley, her site is called Small Business Strategy. I was really grateful for her presentation because it put a lot of things about freelancing and business in perspective for me.

Related Articles:
12.15.04 - "Why Freelance?" - Creative Latitudes