How to stop freelance from killing you
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The "free" in freelance is what we all love about it, but it's also the creator of the biggest challenge: the equation that governs our self-employed lives is most often "do more work, get more money". The discipline required to work is eclipsed by the discipline required to not work. This talk looks at self-working from a holistic perspective: Mike will look at some of the tools and techniques that are useful in helping freelancers balance their working lives, get on top of scheduling, build the confidence to say no - and ultimately find time to do things other than work.
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[ or: things that make me saner when I’m doing them ]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/stopfreelancefromkillingyou-180313084024/85/how-to-stop-freelance-from-killing-you-1-320.jpg)
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How to stop freelance from killing you
- 1. How to stop freelance from killing you [ or: things that make me saner when I’m doing them ]
- 2. I’m the less beautiful half of Thirty8 Digital. We’re nice people who talk sense about the web. > we build beautiful, functional, content-rich websites > we train people on how to use things like social media > we offer consultancy, particularly around web strategy and content > we work almost exclusively with museums, including:
- 3. Me, me, me • Self employed: 1995-1997 • Waterstone’s Online: 1998 - 2000 • Head of Digital, Science Museum: 2000-2007 • Moved to Bath: 2003 (homeworked) • Eduserv: 2007-2011 • Set up Thirty8 Digital with Mrs E: 2011
- 6. 2012: moved to Devon by mistake (“just for a year”)
- 7. 2014: clearly we weren’t going back to Bath. 2018: still here (just over the border in Cornwall now)
- 8. Ask: does technology clear spaces in our lives to fill with meaning or does it fill our lives with crap?
- 9. Tech will kill you save you kill you save you kill you save you somewhere in between there is a balance: we just have to find it
- 10. Finding sanity as a freelancer is about defining boundaries.
- 11. 8 hours SLEEP 8 hours WORK 8 hours REST Your life in 24 hours: the theory
- 12. ? hours SLEEP ? hours WORK ? hours REST …the reality
- 13. ? hours SLEEP ? hours REST warping the boundaries: email on your phone work from anywhere mobile notifications … etc In a “normal job”
- 14. ? hours SLEEP ? hours REST email on your phone work from anywhere mobile notifications … etc ..PLUS the damn office is in your house and there isn’t even any friction in getting there ..PLUS …the kids, the washing up, the thing that needs painting, the grass that needs cutting, ooh: a piano, might just have a quick sandwich before I start ..etc etc As a freelancer
- 15. …when you’re a freelancer, you usually have a direct relationship between time worked and money earned
- 16. ? hours SLEEP ? hours REST email on your phone work from anywhere mobile notifications … etc ..PLUS the damn office is in your house and there isn’t even any friction in getting there ..PLUS …the kids, the washing up, the thing that needs painting, the grass that needs cutting, ooh: a piano, might just have a quick sandwich before I start ..etc etc As a freelancer ..PLUS WE HAVEN’T EVEN MENTIONED CASHFLOW AND MONEY WORRIES YET
- 17. I love my work. I just don’t want it to be my life.
- 18. So: here are some ideas on how to “tame the tech” Caution: contains opinion If you use it with care and thought, technology can help you with keeping solid boundaries. (sadly, the default for most tech is to trample all over these boundaries..)
- 19. Mobile
- 20. An average person checks their smartphone 150 times a day. That’s once every 6 minutes.
- 21. Mobiles are mind- blowingly useful but they also erode almost all the boundaries there are
- 22. "Even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention - as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones - the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capability." Dr Adrian Ward, University of Texas https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/06/27/just-looking- smartphone-makes-less-intelligent-study-finds/
- 23. Make your mobile boring • Turn off notifications for all apps • Remove work email • Plug your phone in on silent at the end of the day and leave it alone • (not in the bedroom..) • Remove as many apps as you can, especially social ones • Take your social apps off your phone - they’ll eat your life. • Try going for a short walk without your phone. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, go for a longer walk without it
- 24. IF SOMETHING IS REALLY IMPORTANT, YOUR CLIENT WILL CALL YOU.
- 25. Email
- 26. the inbox of doom.. • Email is unavoidable - but clear it as quickly as you possibly can. If you’re one of those “10,237 unread emails in inbox” people, give up now :-) • Move to Gmail if you don’t have it already. No other email gives you the same power of labels, filters and search • Identity and separate tasks / to-do’s. I use Teamwork extensively and forward all emails that are tasks to a task list (Teamwork) - then I can be planned about when I do things. Trello also has this. This enables you to resist the urge to be reactive • I don’t particularly like David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) - but capture/clarify/organise/reflect/engage are useful ways of thinking about tasks
- 28. • Trello • Teamwork • Wunderlist • Todoist • Remember the Milk • Evernote… etc
- 29. Planning
- 30. • Teamwork • Ganttr • aha.io • smartsheet.com • …a spreadsheet!
- 31. • Weekly planning on Mondays • Email time • Different calendars - meetings, tasks, structure • Focus on different types of things all together in one block (admin / tech / etc) • Tasks brought in from
- 32. Research shows that it takes about 25 minutes to get back on track once you’re interrupted. Tools like FocusApp (Mac) / FocusMe (Windows) will help you do this - as will turning off notifications (both on desktop and your mobile!)
- 33. Money
- 34. Freelance [money to time] is normally linear, but can you find ways in your work to break this cycle?
- 35. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Keep a track, but also interpret with intelligence
- 36. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Edward Abbey, Author and environmentalist
- 37. Iron out the cashflow bumps • Put aside 20% of every invoice you’re paid into a “what if” savings account • This will cover your tax bill but will also build over time so you’ve got a “oh f***, I don’t have any work” moment • Use a spreadsheet to help you manage this • Move to accounting software only when / if you need to (repeating invoices, chasing invoices, lots of invoices)
- 38. Do “pain maths” x = days to do awful thing y = your day rate z = cost p = pain factor (between -1 and 1 where 1 = you hate it) z = p(x * z) Example: 8 days to do end of year accounts £250 day rate Pain factor = 1 (awful) Cost of you doing end of year accounts = £2,000 Therefore, paying £500 to an accountant / software to do your accounts is excellent value
- 39. Charge more: live the opposite side of the pain equation
- 40. Think like a landing page: what pain do you solve? what value do you bring? how are you relevant to your client base?
- 41. Say no
- 43. Hardware • Buy a really great computer. (preferably a Mac). It’s an investment, but it’s an investment worth making • Consider a standing desk - it’ll change your life • Buy a (good) second monitor if you don’t have one already • Get a mouse and a keyboard rather than working with laptop and trackpad - your RSI will thank you • invest in beds and sofas, too :-)
- 44. Move to the cloud • Teamwork Project Management (starts at £0 per month: I pay £18 a month) - Like BaseCamp, but good :-) • Google Apps (£3.30 per user per month), with InsyncHQ (£30 one off) • FreeAgent (between £10 and £15 a month depending on freelance status) • Dropbox (£99 p/a / depends) • Trello (free) • “Domain specific” software - for example I pay for ManageWP, DeployHQ, Hosting platform x3, Premium plugins… etc etc
- 45. Back up All The Things • There will come a day when you royally balls it up and you’ll hate yourself if you haven’t • Personally, I go much too far: • Backblaze to “backup my whole computer” to somewhere remote (£36 a year) • Ditching Office, and doing everything in Google Docs (or Office 365 if that’s your thing) • Time Machine if you’re a Mac user (~£80 depending on hard drive) or Backup/Restore if you’re on a PC • A Synology home server (£200)
- 46. Brain
- 47. “Read yourself” Work out the physical and mental signals that signify a lack of balance and then focus on these
- 48. Not working • Identify and allow time for flow activities. • Take “deliberate rest” • Mindfulness • Eat well • Active time / exercise
- 49. That’s it. Questions, thoughts, opinions? thirty8.co.uk hello@thirty8.co.uk 0800 808 54 38 @m1ke_ellis coast.org.uk
Notas del editor
- Hi. I’m Mike Ellis. I’m going to talk about some of the challenges of freelancing - and how technology can help and hinder us in finding a balanced life. I come at this from two points of view. > I’m a successful freelancer - we do well from a financial point of view > …but I’m not always successful in living a life of balance.. This is a perfect time of year for me to be talking about this - for a number of reasons (project creep / not allowing enough time on my part coupled with the “spend money by end March” Museum curse) - I am at a fairly unbalanced phase in my working life. I’m pretty stressed, I’ve got a cold and it’s just possible my voice will go. If I break down at any point, please feel free to cuddle me :-) Therefore today I hope to shed some light on some of the real challenges that freelance brings - and the solutions that I know from past experience can really work when you’re disciplined enough to be doing them. There is 10 minutes at the end for questions.
- So to give some context - I’m one half of Thirty8 Digital. We’re a teeny consultancy of two (me and my wife) - and we work pretty much exclusively with museums on all things digital.
- I’ve been freelancing now for 7 years. Prior to this I did these things.
- 2012: we moved here, a mile from the nearest village, half a mile from the sea. …in the middle of a valley ..by a stream. ..with 1Mbs broadband and no mobile signal.
- I’d burnt myself out founding Bath Digital Festival and we wanted to do something completely different. Just for a year. Kids were 4 and 7. The intention was to live here for a year and then go back to Bath where we’d lived for ten years.
- Here’s me on the left and Mrs Ellis on the right. The local moonshine cider is pretty dangerous.
- 2018: we still haven’t moved back to Bath. We like the people, the pace of life, the work/life balance. London might be a 10 hour round trip, but that’s a price we’re prepared to pay for being able to look at the sea.
- My Usborne book of the Future (1979) suggested that technology would mean we could all work 5 hour weeks while the robots picked up the slack doing all the rubbish menial jobs. Excited though I am about tech, if our relationship with mobile phones (much more on this later..) is anything to go by - we’re going to continue to use technology to fill the gaps in our lives with crap, rather than using technology to clear spaces in our lives to fill with meaning.
- I’ve been known to be prone to hyperbole - but in the case of technology this really is about nuance. Technology will neither kill us nor save us - but the better we are at it - the more aware we are of its possible strengths and weaknesses - the more able we are to tame it and bend it to our will.
- For me, this time of stress has forced us to reflect really hard on what it is Rach and I want from life - and that in turn has forced me to think really hard about the way that I’m managing my balance. The whole freelance sanity conversation seems to me to be about creating and nurturing boundaries - finding ways to delineate between the various facets of our lives. Because of the nature of freelance working, this has to be holistic.
- A theoretical 24 hour day looks like this.
- In reality of course, the balance is rarely kept, partly because of fragmentation but also because the boundaries are almost always forced out of shape.
- Technology should be helping us work less, but the reality for most people in a “normal” job is that it warps the boundaries the wrong way. You don’t work less, you work in more places and for more of the time. You’ll email that spreadsheet to work on it at home, you’ll get a text from your boss, you’ll make some notes about the meeting tomorrow…
- Things are worse as a freelancer. Your boundaries are further pushed by a whole range of factors.
- …not to mention the fact that you can always be making more money
- Before you know it, you’re drowning in it. Nice transition :-)
- I’ve done 60 hour weeks in my 20’s. It was ok then. I had all the energy in the world, and no dependants. Now, I’ve got kids who will probably be leaving home in the next ten years. I have zero desire to be the dad that they never see.
- With this in mind, I’ve gathered together a bunch of things that I think are particularly important when working as a freelancer - some of which I’m good at, some of which I’m still working on :-) Most of them have a technology angle, but some don’t.
- I’d like to try a little experiment. Could everyone please get their smartphones out, turn notifications ON and then put their phones face down in front of them. First to make a noise wins a chocolate. Most interruptions wins a bottle of wine. We’ll see how this goes…
- Now, I’m really not going to head off into hyperbole territory, honest. But: I think we should all be really concerned about the relationship we have with our phones - and don’t get me started on how parent’s are (aren’t) dealing with this for their kids..
- The endless dopamine rush is crushing our boundaries: we’re bumping into people in the street, ignoring our kids, unable to have a coherent conversation without checking our phone. We sleep, eat, laugh, exercise, work, “relax” without this bit of plastic leaving our hands. It’s on the table when we’re out for a drink. As a human being, this is awful. As a freelancer, this is potentially catastrophic. Ask: how much of your digital time is needed, and how much is just a habit of self-distraction and time filling.
- My advice is to get desktop apps for your social tools and not access them on your mobile. This gives you better control - both technically, and from a human “being present” point of view. (and yes, you can get Instagram apps for deskop, albeit unofficial ones)
- For about 10 years now, various technology companies have been claiming that their tool is “the end to email” or “email is broken” - but the reality is, it’s at the absolute hub of almost everyone’s working life. There aren’t universal replacements. There are tools like Slack which (some claim) take the pressure off email - but the reality is you will be using email with your clients - so finding ways of making it more manageable are absolutely key.
- I’ve done a bunch of workshops on how to manage institutional tech and email better - and without any doubt there are two or three things that really help. Firstly, search and categorisation: having email that you can always find - using either some kind of tagging or just brute force search - is really critical. Gmail is really the only email service that does this brilliantly. Secondly, identifying and separating actions: for me this is about having an empty inbox, having moved all things that require action out of that inbox and into somewhere where I can apply more structure to the task. Linkable email is also really useful
- My particular workflow goes like this - an email comes in, I reply. If it has a “please can you do X” that I can’t immediately do right then, I BCC in the address of my task manager (in my case, Teamwork). Later (more on planning in a minute) - I go in and figure out when I’m going to do that task.
- There are lots of ways of doing this - labels (gmail, but other clients have folders etc) - also email clients that let you send email content to your task manager or Trello or whatever. The BCC to a secret email address option is really good though because it’ll work from any email and has minimal disruption to your workflow. All the above tools can be emailed and almost all of them have a free plan.
- Freelancers are typically juggling a whole bunch of projects at any one time. They may be “formal” projects with stakeholders, beginning and end dates, deliverables and critical paths - or they may simply be a bunch of tasks which have to be completed in some kind of order. Tech is particularly adapt at helping with this stuff and there are a plethora of tools out there to help you project plan.
- My favourite if you haven’t noticed already is Teamwork (free plan available but I pay £18 a month). People love Basecamp (it’s rubbish, don’t use it). There are others like Asana - all basically have the same stuff: file storage, task management, time-keeping, collaboration with clients, etc etc. All the above also have a focus of plotting work timelines and managing what needs to be done when
- Having a weekly method helps keep things on track too. Here’s mine. It may seem over-complicated but actually having a structure generally means that you find time for things other than work. Task switching is really inefficient (which is why interruptions are a bad thing) - so as well as planning ahead and being proactive with your time rather than reactive the most important thing I’ve learned is to do similar things in blocks of time - the brain seems to work better in this way.
- Research from University of California shows the impact of interruptions - about 25 minutes to get back on track on a task after being interrupted. Turning off notifications, and removing your access to email altogether is absolutely key to this and really helps!
- Eeek.
- We had this graph already - but it’s the key source of angst for freelancers - you don’t get paid at weekends, holidays, sick days… One of the ways to deal with this is to start building up whatever non-linear sources of income you can. Ben Matthews is going to talk about this loads more later - but think about whether you can “productise” your offering in any way? Paid worksheets, retainers, courses, workshops, things that you can write once and then deliver many times - this will give you some non-linearity in your income.
- Two possible ways of interpreting this graph. Interpretation 1: We peaked in Year 5 Analysis: WE’RE ON A DOWNWARD TRAJECTORY! WE’RE NO LONGER GROWING! PANIC! Interpretation 2: The amount of cash we require to live a happy life was passed in year 2 Analysis: We’ve got way more than we need. All is good.
- Chris talked about growth on a global level. It’s also true on a local, individual level. You have to fight growth - it is almost inevitable - you win work, you do good work, the next piece of work is bigger, for a bigger client…. Figure out what kind of freelancer you are. Are you a coaster, a grower, or something else?
- We’re cautious people so put aside way more than we need. This helps build up a pot of cash for slow times. Tech can help with this - whether a simple spreadsheet or finance software
- Remember that all time spent not working is cost. Do some simple maths about some of the things you don’t like doing. Chances are you can pay someone or something to do stuff for you - software, your accountant, a painter and decorator or even a virtual assistant. Time tracking tools will help you do this, not only to help justify but also so you get a good handle on how long your work really takes!
- If you spend any time at all on the web reading startup forums and so on, you’ll see this advice again and again. Your client is living the other side of the “pain maths” equation - they’re paying you to do a thing that they don’t have time / aren’t qualified for. Be clear about the value that you bring!
- Think about your time in terms of what your client gets. See if you can articulate it as if you’ve got a landing page.
- When you first start freelancing, you’ll say yes to everything. Then you should build the confidence to say no if a bit of work doesn’t feel right, isn’t enough cash or time. Also be confident in suggesting different ways of approaching a client’s brief.
- You will be spending a lot of time in front of your computer, so make it comfortable and non hating time.
- Move everything to the cloud. Use GD instead of Office. Use Open Office if you really need desktop software. So many services offer a free tier - you can try them out
- Ask yourself: what if my computer dropped into a hole right now. How quickly could I be up and running again..? But: be aware that this can mean “work from anywhere at anytime” so be careful of your boundaries…!
- Finally - and not much tech here - but be aware of you. I’ve meditated on and off for ~8 years, but I still need to work on it as a habit. There are tools out there like meditation timers but really nothing beats the discipline of just doing it and getting into a routine.
- Work out the signals that suggest your balance is off. For me it is short and bad quality sleep… If you’re self obsessed like I am then tools like Fitbit will tell you how badly you sleep. No idea what happened on the 15th, don’t think I’ve ever had 12 hours sleep…
- Finally - set aside time to not work, and lose yourself in it completely. This is “flow” activity - I think Bridget will be talking more about this later. I do a printmaking course ever Monday pm (don’t tweet this, I tell my clients I’m at a workshop which is true in some ways..) But - this time is 100% away from work. No email, no messages, just 3 hours of flow activity.
- I’ll be writing some more at coast.org.uk so if you’re interested in continuing the conversation please sign up to the non-spammy mailing list there.