This isn’t something I’ve talked about on this blog before (apologies to anyone who thought this was just about video games), but I quit my job last year to pursue life as a freelancer. I work in the tech industry (as I referenced in On URL Tracking) and I have, for the most part, been very successful in the last year. I’ve been able to find work through my network, my skills have been in high demand, and I’ve juggled between 3 and 6 clients on a monthly basis since I started. I’ve essentially doubled my full-time salary.
And fuck am I tired.
I naively believed that working for myself would make all the difference. That working hard was fine as long as I was the one dictating the terms. That as long as I was doing good work for good people for good pay, the amount of work I was doing would be less overwhelming.
What’s annoying is that I was right! Initially, even when I was really busy it felt good. I was putting my skills to work for myself, and I was making more money than I’d ever made before. I was learning and I was crushing it.
But only for a while.
It took until about a month ago for this feeling to really start sinking in. I started staying up later and getting less sleep. I sold deals to 2 clients at the same time and I kept mixing them up in my mind. I stopped learning new skills, and the skills I did learn weren’t nearly as satisfying.
I stopped having fun.
In retrospect, this all seems very obvious. I made clear mistakes:
- Signed clients at lower prices to ‘get my foot in the door,’ hoping that by proving myself I could then charge more. Which, for the record, does work. At least for me, at least within this space. But the problem with this approach is that energy and care and investment are finite. Spending months working at a rate below what I wanted sapped my energy and interest in the client and their problems so that when I did get more money from them I was already most of the way toward wanting to move on. And getting them to pay me more was painful. I think they felt like they were doing me a favor, and the pressure on me to justify that increased expense was absolutely not worth it
- I really like the variety of working with many different clients in different spaces. But a combination of decision fatigue, continuous onboarding, and a barrage of different social environments have had a cumulative and deleterious effect on my sanity. It’s a stacking, exponential build that starts slow then ramps up until it’s overwhelming. This snuck up on me big time
- I’m not charging enough money but I’m struggling to make the leap to the next level of pricing. I’m getting into conversations around my value that I really don’t want to be having, and I really hate tracking my time. I’m not entirely sure how to get out of this zone, but I’d love to live in a world where I do high-paying projects and ditch hourly work completely. I’ve flirted with doing that but I’m not charging enough for the projects I’ve done to make it possible. I’m just sitting in this awkward zone and I’m having a tough time moving past it
- Not only have I been working with too many clients over too short of a time period (at last count, I’ve worked with more than 14 companies in the last year), I also founded a company with a few friends, built ~10 Python tools for myself, and wrote 14 blog posts on my company blog (most of them 600-1000 words). I also created a newsletter for said blog, started posting regularly on LinkedIn, joined 2 professional organizations within my field, attended a conference, restructured my LLC and hired an accountant, started advising a new tech startup on how to build their product, went on my first business trip, and built 4 websites. I taught myself how to use ETL and Reverse ETL tools on my own time, and created standardized SQL scripts for anyone to use. I figured out how to process payments through Stripe and built an entire business on the back of that knowledge; there’s 70 people paying me money every month because of that, which is terrifying. THIS IS JUST STRAIGHT UP TOO
MANY THINGS FOR A PERSON TO DO AT THE SAME TIME WITHOUT LOSING THEIR MIND
—break—
So. Where do I go from here? I’ve got obligations galore and I’m reluctant to let anything go. I don’t want to let down the people that rely on me, and I want to be able to do it all. But I think I’m having a moment where that’s just not possible. I am not having fun anymore. And no amount of poking at neat technical challenges is going to change that, at least not right now. I need to figure something else out. Disconnect for a while. Reset and reorient. Or something.
The terrifying part about feeling this way when you don’t have a full-time job is that there’s absolutely no safety net aside from the one you build yourself. I’ve got savings I can lean on while I find my feet again, because I planned for this and hedged against it. But I need a clearer plan for how I find my feet again.
I don’t know what that looks like. But I think that’s the most important work I can do right now.
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