One of The Biggest Lessons I Learned In Transitioning To Full-Time Freelance
Moving from hectic, disorganized, and fast-paced work environments, my first year of full-time freelancing was full of adjustments.
I started building my client base before leaving my full-time gig. So when I took the step to full-time freelance, I had a firm foundation but also had some capacity.
The free time made my skin crawl. I felt like I wasn’t busy enough — like I was failing somehow. However, I was hitting all of my revenue goals. It was a dichotomy that took me a minute to reconcile.
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In reality, I learned that much of what I had been doing during my ten years of corporate life was `fake work`. Things like:
- Parkinson’s law says “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” In an office setting, if you can finish your work early, bully for you! But politically, you still can’t leave until 5:15. So you make a 5-minute task take 15, or a 1-hour task take 2. Maybe not consciously, but you create overhead because there is no benefit to being efficient. You are not permitted to be caught up. At best, the benefit is getting to do more work. Neat…
- Offices have managers, and if they are not micromanagers, there are parts of your work they do not intimately know. Subsequently, you must have meetings — time spent solely duplicating information. If you are fortunate, you may also be duplicating knowledge. But regardless, there is no additional output. Just more overhead.
- In many of the career stops I have made, the hardest part of my job happened between my desk and the door to the office. The clients and the services we provided were easy. All of my time and mental energy went to cutting through bureaucracy, massaging the egos, catching up the laggards, and obtaining the permission of disconnected managers. Again, all of this time was spent without any additional output (or revenue) to show for it. #fakework
Now that I am a freelancer, I am free from the drivers of fake work. My work is work in its purest form.
Now, if I finish work early, I spend time with my wife and daughter.
Now, I only have external meetings, and I wrangle them all into one day per week. I am left with hours of uninterrupted time each week, allowing me to complete my work more efficiently.
Now, the marketplace is the only permission I need. The successes are my own, as are the failures. But because I can fail so much quicker, I can get to my successes sooner.
Most days I only work from 9:30–3:30. I still occasionally worry that is not enough, but those moments are fewer and fewer. As it turns out, when you cut out all of the fake work, you have a lot more time for real work — and more time for real life.
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Originally published at RobBettis.com on January 31, 2018.
