Have you ever wondered what it feels like to wake up and simply be on time and at your office each day? Walking down the hallway, no commuting, no rush, no traffic, the perfect aroma of your tea or coffee filling the atmosphere, the perfect toasted bread right in your facility, the perfect timing and it’s all at home.
Well, this is a question I had in my head for many years after working as a 9 to 5 graphic designer. The occasional variation of a day off and the often “never ending days in the life of a designer” where you wake up not knowing if you will go back to bed that night due to a project emergency, last minute call or even worst, getting stuck in a graveyard shift. All that can become a burden and jeopardise your family stability. I also completed my military duties ( Honourably discharged ) and recently had my question answered after taking the proper steps to make it happen.
After many years working to make someone else’s dream come true, I realise that it was time for me to do what I wanted to do and at the rhythm and speed I wanted to do it. Sure it was scary, but nothing can be worse than never trying something and forever regretting that decision.
At the time of jumping into my freelancing life, I had some experience working with customers over the phone and from far away only using e-mail based communication over the internet. My military time serve me very well to round up the skills to properly organise my thoughts in a written communicate/e-mail. This is a critical piece of information for you who want to become a freelancer. Poor grammatical skills can quickly escalate into miscommunication, timeliness issues, project errors and further more loosing the prospective or acquired clients.
The part I enjoy the most is the ability to learn something new, a new skill, a new technique, a new word, just because your current project requires you to learn something new. Meaning that you have acquired knowledge that will remain with you forever, because of your own efforts in wanting to understand the project and the task at hand. I enjoy learning new technologies and new ways on how can I improve my current pipeline.
Perfection is far from reality when you are a freelancer. Patience and understanding plays a huge role when it comes to dealing with your clients. Delivering what the client wants you to deliver when the client itself does not know exactly what it wants to begin with can be problematic. Sometimes you can also get stuck in the never-ending cycle of reviewing a project and delayed in receiving the remaining 50% or 75% of the project’s payment due to a numerous of reasons that I can entirely write another post just on that subject.
In a world where time and pay are equally valuable you as a freelancer require something better than a simple head-hunter or a crowdsourcing website to gather valuable talents, good leads and proven contracts. The key to success is organisation and self motivation. Keep your desk and agenda organise. Send as many emails and make as many calls as you can each day to account for the downtime. Trust me, you will have plenty of down-time, use that time to tighten your agenda and create new plans. Use the down time to update things you have left behind. Write a blog article, make sure you do something productive with that valuable time.
Thank you for reading, make sure to let us know what you think about it in the comment section.