Thoughts on Freelancing

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An answer to a question posted on LinkedIn.

View Maria Langer's profile on LinkedInI was sifting through my e-mail in box this morning and found an update from LinkedIn. It’s the usual update that tells me what my contacts are up to. I saw that one of them had answered a question in the LinkedIn Answers area. It was a question that interested me:

Are most of the freelancers doing what they are happy to do?

The question went on to ask why we chose to be freelancers and, oddly enough, whether we’re “keen” to be freelancers if we have a full-time job. (Must be a Brit; don’t know anyone who uses the word keen that way.)

The question reminded me that there are a lot of non-freelancers out there, peeking at us from over the tops of their cubicles. They like what they see — people working their own hours and being their own bosses — but they don’t quite understand it. They think they want to be freelancers, but if they’re smart — like this guy is — they’ll do their homework first. His questions told me that he was just starting that homework. I wanted to help him get it done.

I logged into LinkedIn and offered the following response:

I started my freelance career in 1990 and haven’t looked back.

I like the idea that I get paid for what I do, not whether I fill space in a cubicle every day. I work harder now and get more satisfaction than when I had the big corporate job with the corner office.

Sometimes I work my butt off to get a job done on time. Sometimes I have multiple jobs requiring my attention. During these times, I work far more than 40 hours a week. But I’m getting paid for doing REAL work. And I’ll get more work based on how well I get each job done. I earn my pay and my job security.

When there’s nothing lined up that requires immediate attention or I’m taking a break between projects, I have the freedom to take time off and do the things I want to do. In my very flexible spare time, I learned to fly, I take road trips, I goof off. If a friend calls with an idea to spend the day and there’s nothing important on the front burner, I go. That makes freelancing worth it.

But there’s no such thing as a weekend anymore. If a job needs doing and the only day to do it is on Sunday, I work on Sunday. Simple as that.

You ask if we’re keen to be freelancing if we have a full time job. Don’t fool yourself — freelancing can be a full-time job. And don’t think about a freelance job if you have another full-time job. Isn’t your life more important than working 60 to 80 hours a week? Instead, let a freelance career replace a full-time job. Use it to improve your life, not make more stress.

But be prepared. When you’re your own boss, you’ll quickly learn the importance of getting the job done and making the client happy. If you screw up, there’s no one to blame except you. And there’s no one to rescue you, either.

Freelancing is not for everyone. If you’re a chronic procrastinator, stay in your cube — you’ll starve if you can’t deliver. If you’re afraid to sell your services or products, you’ll never make it as a freelancer. (There’s always something to sell and someone to sell to, even if you need to sell to the person who will sell for you.) If you think freelancing means a lot of free time without a boss looking over your shoulder, you got that wrong. The client or customer is the boss and you’ll probably work harder as a freelancer than you have in any other job you’ve ever held.

Is it worth it? I think so. But then again, I never did have patience for the 9 to 5 grind and its pointless office appearances.

(If telecommuting is available at your workplace, try that first. You’ll have the same regular paycheck and benefits and the same work but you won’t waste hours a day traveling to and from a central workplace office. Your quality of life simply has to improve — especially if your daily commute is more than an hour each way.)

Got something to add or perhaps a more specific question? Please use the Comments link or form for this post to share them.

Bribed

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To make a holiday trip back east more palatable, my husband “bribes” me with two nights in Manhattan.

A few weeks ago, we started making plans for the holidays. I was given a choice: go back to New York to visit family for Thanksgiving or Christmas?

I chose Thanksgiving. My brother, who was trained as a chef, makes a great Thanksgiving dinner. A few years ago, I had a bunch of cheeses shipped to his house and we snacked on them with champagne while the turkey cooked. (Or while we waited for him to realize that he’d forgotten to turn on the oven and then waited for the turkey to cook.) It was a fun time with a small group of family members: my brother, his wife, his sister-in-law, my sister, Mike, and me. The next day, we went into Queens, in New York, to have dinner with Mike’s family.

Why Not Christmas

Christmas in New York is a crazy time. Traffic is maddening and the crowds are outrageous. And, to make matters even less pleasant, it’s usually cold and gray. So anytime you’re not snug in someone’s home or in a well-heated car, you’re shivering. Well, at least I am. (One of the top five reasons I left New York was the weather.)

I Love NYI do need to say that there’s something magic about midtown Manhattan at Christmas time. The tree and skating rink at Rockefeller Center, the window displays on Fifth Avenue, the smell of roasting pretzels and chestnuts, the steam rising from the manhole covers, the speeding cabs and blasting car horns on the avenues.

If I had unlimited financial resources, one of my homes would be in midtown Manhattan and I’d probably spend the weeks leading up to Christmas there. But that’s the only way I’d live in New York — if I had a ton of money and could elevate myself above those crowds and car horns and steam. Living down in it all just isn’t for me.

About Queens (the place, not the people)

Anyway, this year I chose Thanksgiving, fully expecting dinner at my brother’s New Jersey home again. Mike would invite his family to join us. That was the plan.

Except Mike’s family didn’t want to drive to New Jersey on Thanksgiving day. Instead, they wanted us to drive to Queens. I told Mike my brother wouldn’t want to do that. He said he’d ask. And then he did a sly thing. He called my brother’s wife and asked her. She, of course, said yes and managed to convince the rest of the party to come along. So we were going to Queens for Thanksgiving.

I don’t like Queens. And I certainly don’t mean to offend anyone who lives there. It just isn’t for me. I don’t see anything positive about it. I lived there for two years — in Bayside, in case you’re wondering — and did not enjoy that time at all. Living in Queens is like living in a buffer zone. Not quite real “city” like Manhattan but not quite “suburbs” like Long Island or New Jersey. It has all the unpleasantness of a big city with few of its benefits. And although there are houses like the ones you’d find in the suburbs, there’s little suburban atmosphere. In the two years we lived there, we had a car stolen and two cars and a scooter vandalized. (And Bayside was supposed to be a nice part of Queens.) Even if you find a pleasant pocket of homes on tree-lined streets, its surrounded by the same, miserable pseudo-city filth, traffic, crime, and graffiti.

(If you live in Queens and are outraged by my statements, accept my apologies. I really don’t mean to offend you — I’m just stating, as usual, my personal opinion. Use the Comments link or form to state your case on why I’m wrong. Just don’t expect to change my mind. I’ve been to a lot of places in 49 of this country’s 50 states — I’ve never been to Minnesota — and Queens is pretty darn close to the bottom of my list of places I might want to live. Like I said: it just isn’t for me.)

Yet every time we go back east, we go to Queens. That’s where Mike’s mom and sister and uncle still live. It’s tolerable on a regular day, but I knew it would be crazy with traffic and crowds on a holiday like Thanksgiving. (Did I mention the traffic? Well, it’s certainly worth mentioning again.) I didn’t want to go, but Mike had conned the rest of my family into it so I had no choice.

But I didn’t have to be happy about it.

The Bribe

Grand Central Terminal ConcourseHence, the bribe. Mike booked two nights in the Sheraton on 52st and 7th in Manhattan. Walking distance from Times Square, which I understand has been substantially cleaned up since I worked in the area 20+ years ago. (Did I ever mention the bum who touched my butt as I was walking up 7th Avenue at 41st Street at lunchtime one day? It was the first time I ever struck a stranger. Hmmm. It might be the only time.) Also within walking distance of Rockefeller Center, Grand Central (shown here), and numerous other interesting places.

The Municipal BuildingAnd with two full days to play tourist, I’d have a great opportunity to walk my old stomping grounds down in the financial district, City Hall area (including the Municipal Building (shown here), where I used to work), and Chinatown.

And eat. New York has the best restaurants. I’m especially looking forward to dim sum in Chinatown and a box of Ferraro’s Italian pastries from Little Italy. (They make the best rainbow layer cookies.)

I’m also looking forward to riding the subway (oddly enough) and to taking photos with my new lenses. I have some great ideas for using that fisheye lens on a subway platform. I hope to be able to show off the results here.

So I’m Happy

So I’ve been bribed and I’m happy about it. It’s the first time in years that I’ve really looked forward to going back east.

And as I told Mike this morning at breakfast, he’s going to have to get us a hotel room in New York for at least two nights every time we go back there.

Two Blogs? Again?

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After over a year of soul-searching, I decide to spin off my book support topics to their own site.

I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under aneclecticmind.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?

Some Things are Better Seen from the Air

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The Goosenecks of the San Juan.

Mike Reyfman took this photo during one of our photo flights this past October. It’s an aerial view of the Goosenecks of the San Juan River.

Goosenecks of San Juan River

To give you a sense of scale, the line with the little box at the end of it in the lower-left corner of the photo is a road with a parking area. There are cars parked in the parking area. You can’t see them in this photo at this size.

The landscape of the San Juan River area near Mexican Hat Utah is simply magnificent. I did a lot of flying in this area with Mike’s group, then had the pleasure of heading upriver as far as Shiprock and Farmington, NM. The few photos I took while flying simply cannot compare to the images Mike captured.

If any photographers are out there reading this, let me take you some cool places like this! Visit Flying M Air’s Web site for information about aerial photography from my helicopter.

Praying at the Wall

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More humor from a friend.

Here’s another amusing tidbit I got from a friend of mine. If you know the author of this piece, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

A female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time.

So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site. She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him for an interview.

“Pardon me, sir, I’m Rebecca Smith from CNN. What’s your name?”

“Morris Feinberg,” he replied.

“Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?”

“For about 60 years.”

“60 years! That’s amazing! What do you pray for?”

“I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims. I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop. I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults, and to love their fellow man.”

“How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?”

“Like I’m talking to a f*ckin’ wall.”