Photo by *Solar ikon*.

I am a coward.

Despite the prevalent American ideals of self-reliance, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and industriousness, all I want is a decent job that gives me a steady paycheck and my own personal slice of quiet desperation. I even gave that a shot right out of college, securing employment at an online retail company for two years before I was laid off due to the struggling economy. I gave it another shot after that, this time working at a large law firm, before I was let go again two months later.

So, with no real immediate job prospects, I started surfing job boards for freelance writing gigs. Somehow, even though I was just looking for a way to make some food money until I got my real job (which never came despite hundreds of resumes sent to companies in every industry imaginable), I wound up getting enough work to freelance full time eventually.

But while most people might have been glad that they got fired when they did, thus leading down this unexpected path of self-employment, I’m a little less enthusiastic.

Why? Continue Reading

Image by RossinaBossioB.

One of the reasons many of us choose to start a freelance business is the option of largely escaping time-based payment. If a task only takes an hour, it takes an hour. People like us get paid the same whether we fill a day with it or not.

While freelancers who’ve made efforts to escape time-based pay get some pretty neat perks, there’s a trade-off: a heightened risk of over-work.

Unless they’re being given more work than they can feasibly do in the time, 20, or 40, or 70-hour per week workers don’t necessarily need to be more productive. For project-paid freelancers, the speed with which we can fly through tasks will dictate how financially successful we are.

And there’s the rub. There’s nobody telling us to go home at the end of the day, there’s no point beyond which our work is unpaid simply because it’s late in the evening, no time when the office lights start to go out, no pre-paid hours. We complete a task, we get paid, and we can complete most tasks at any time of the day or night, on any day of the week. It’s no surprise that many freelancers are overworked. The lure of “one more project, one more invoice” can be hard to resist. Continue Reading