Drawing the Line Between Personal and Business Life
Credit: Nik Muhd Faris Fathi on Flickr
A topic that affects freelancers, especially those new to the freelance world, is separating your personal life and ‘me time’ from work. After all, if you’re sitting at home in your underwear working on a design for a client – it doesn’t really feel much like work.
To better understand why freelancers have this problem, let’s look at why workers of the typical 9-5 office job don’t have to deal with this as much as us work-at-home types. When you take on a typical job, you’re given: your hours to be at work, a work email, and typically a phone number (or extension number), which your boss, and depending on the type of work, possibly your clients know this.
If you work for a small marketing agency and a client needs to get in touch with you at the end of the day, a quick glance at the watch to see that it’s 4:30pm means that the client needs to ring you quickly, as you’ll soon be getting ready to leave. If it’s after your 5pm finish, or an out of hours time such as the weekend, then the contact mediums are obvious; send an email or leave a voicemail. Since your hours are 9-5 on Monday-Friday, it’s easy to work out approximately when you’ll get the all important message.
