One week as a new freelancer

Hi from me, the intentional, new freelancer, at the end of my first “official” work week. The last post was pretty emotionally draining – having to relive my experiences of the past year was not super fun. I felt defeated and guilty for not having worked more and accomplished more. (Confessions of a chronic overachieving perfectionist).

I decided to treat the week of May 17-21 as my first week of work, even though I have been mentally “working” on my freelancing career since October. This felt like the best way to really denote the shift in mindset and to give myself the accountability and responsibility that comes with starting a new job. With that, I’ll give an overview of how I spent the week.

My first week of being a freelancer

On Monday, I worked a few hours on business planning and getting my thoughts about the past year on paper. Tuesday, I spent some time working on actually writing the first blog post. On Wednesday I did not work at all on freelancing, but I did clean the house pretty well. Thursday, I had a car service appointment, so I worked from several hours on my freelancing website, blog, and researching the next things I need to do to get this all off the ground. Friday, again, I did not work at all as a freelancer because I had three appointments.

So, assuming my math is correct, I did under 7 hours of actual work in my first week on the job. Ouch. That’s less than ONE “normal” full day of work. Lots of brainstorming happened outside of those hours, because I am almost always thinking about my job. When I take an honest look at that… it felt like I did more work than that, and it is hard to believe that I worked for less than a normal full workday. That might actually be encouraging, though. I got several things accomplished, so what could I do if I worked a full week?

The emotional side

I feel bad that I only worked 7 hours, guilty somehow. There’s this internalized idea of a 40-hour work week being the absolute minimum requirement, which certainly impacts me. I also feel like a fake entrepreneur for not working at least 80 hour weeks to get my dream off the ground, even though I am a brand new freelancer.

But at the same time… that 7 hours probably represents more work than I have done in the past 12 months combined. So that progress should count for something, and I am encouraged by gaining some forward momentum. It seems apparent that one thing I need to let go of in this process are the arbitrary “rules” and parameters that often get placed around the concept of work in general. Even if I am a careful new freelancer and I move slowly through the process, part of the reason to pursue this career is to escape the confines of corporate America. So why would I then apply those rigid boundaries when my goal is to be free of them?

Whatever amount of work I did or did not do was at least working toward building a business for myself. And I do want to always have the freedom to work fewer than 40 hours a week so that I can spend my time doing things that really matter to me. 

The tasks I completed were really more big-picture, planning, strategy-based things, but I’ll share a recap here:

• Worked on the services page of my freelancing website
• Wrote out a timeline of the past year so that I could later turn it into a blog post
• Wrote said blog post (well, at least a draft of it)
• Learned about setting up a blog and started researching names for this blog

Moving forward

Each week, I plan to include a section called “in hindsight” where I’ll talk about whether the things I did worked, what I wish I had done instead, and how I see the tasks in the post playing out in present time. The posts will be written in real time – so, I am writing the post for the week of May 17-21 on May 26. But I’ll have a two month posting delay so that I can complete the “in hindsight” section right before posting. For this post, the hindsight section will be written sometime in the week of July 17-21, and this will be posted soon after.

Hopefully this will help you decide how to spend your time since you can see what things worked for me and what wasn’t worth the effort. My goal is that you will learn from MY mistakes, so that you don’t have to wade through as many things that aren’t worth the time.

In hindsight

So, here’s a few thoughts about the things I talked about in this post. First, I wish I hadn’t felt so guilty about not working all day every day. Part of the beauty of being a freelancer is the control over your time! Realistically, until you have clients, the work can be done in far less than 40 hours. Also, guilt is not the best motivator. I totally understand that it can be tough to work through, but I found this article from Inc. helpful.

As far as the tasks themselves, I think they were all good ways to use my time. Research is obviously important in any new venture or project. The freelancing website is CRITICAL to getting clients, so I don’t regret any time spent on that. This blog is an excellent outlet for me to share my experiences, and ideally someday it will reach some readers. No regrets with spending time on it! And really, I don’t have any regrets about my first week. I am extremely proud of myself for starting down the (long, winding) path to freelancing, and I am excited to see where it leads.

Until next time,

Darian